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Date of last revision: 25 March 2002
Editor’s
note: As the restitution of cultural treasures is an ongoing process there will
be regular updates. Please check this page regularly.
Patricia Kennedy Grimsted,
Ukrainian Research Institute,
Displaced foreign cultural treasures
held in
In April 1998
Trophy
Art.
Organizers of the Washington
Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets expressed appreciation that the Russian
delegation adhered to the “Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated
Art” and pledged more archival openness. But the wording of those principles unfortunately
did not extend to confiscated archives, and significant documentation regarding
“trophy” cultural treasures retains a classified status.[6] Russia was less well represented in the
follow-up “Vilnius International Forum on Holocaust-Era Cultural Assets” in
October 2000, but as one potential breakthrough, it was announced that Russia
had accepted an offer of half a million dollars from American Jewish
philanthropists to aid identification of displaced cultural property of
Holocaust victims. Also at the Vilnius Forum Sotheby’s offered funding to help
database development for displaced art under the auspices of the Council of
Europe. Most controversy in
The Yeltsin years after 1991
saw no restitution of art to Germany, nor was there any since the late 1950s
when most of the paintings from the Dresden Gallery and many other
“twice-saved” cultural treasures were returned to East Germany. As the first
important breakthrough under the presidency of Vladimir Putin and the new
Russian law, an “exchange” took place at the end of April 2000: some mosaics
and a commode from the Amber Chamber in the Catherine Palace of Tsarskoe Selo
(Pushkin) that had been plundered by the Nazis and recently found in Germany
were returned to Russia. In “exchange” Russia handed over a collection of 101
drawings and prints from the Bremen Kunsthalle that a Red Army officer (who
requested anonymity before his death) personally brought home from their
wartime hiding place in the Karnzow Castle north of Berlin. Germany has already
been subsidizing the reconstruction of the symbolic Amber Chamber with a $3.5
million grant from Ruhrgas. Germany may be less than satisfied with the
“exchange,” because the 101 Bremen drawings had already been transferred to the
German Embassy in Moscow in 1993 after a request for their restitution, but
remained under export embargo until the spring of 2000.[9]
The sad fate of the Kunsthalle
collections is only one of the most blatant examples of the wide dispersal of
cultural treasures brought to Russia but can only be touched on here. Another
362 drawings and 2 paintings from the Bremen Kunsthalle rescued by fellow Field
Engineering Brigade officer Viktor Baldin remain in state custody in the
Hermitage, where 192 of them in 1992 formed part of the first exhibition of
trophy art in Russia. Baldin, an art historian and architect who personally
brought them to Russia in a suitcase in 1945, had long pleaded for their
restitution with Soviet, and more recently Russian, heads of state. In 1947 he
deposited them for safekeeping in the Shchushev Museum of Architecture when he
became director, but in 1990, when Boris Yeltsin was on the verge of returning
them on his first visit to Germany as president of the Russian Federation, the
Soviet Ministry of Culture (then headed by Nikolai Gubenko) ordered their
transfer to the Hermitage. Another officer in Baldin’s brigade donated his
cache of Bremen drawings to a Samarkand museum, but they were transferred to
the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, where they remain today alongside another group
that had been donated by another officer in the same brigade to a museum in
Novosibirsk.[10]
Still other Bremen drawings
were widely dispersed in the former Soviet Union, although the locations of all
of them are still not known, and only a few of them have been returned. Twelve
recently surfaced in New York (with an estimated value of about $15 million), among them a Rembrandt and two Dürer
drawings, having been stolen from a museum in Azerbaijan, along with 150 other
works of art. As a “happy ending” to an incredible tale of international
intrigue, they were seized by U.S. Customs and returned to Bremen in July 2001
under order of a New York court. An estimated no less than 50 Bremen drawings
ended up in private hands in Ukraine, according to unconfirmed reports. In
1995, six years before the recent Russian act of restitution, one of them was
returned to Bremen from Kyiv:
a self-portrait by the German artist Hans von Marées became “the first
official return to Germany of World War II art booty by one of the former
Soviet republics since the collapse of the USSR.” In a subsequent presidential
visit in February 1998, three additional drawings went back to Bremen from
Kyiv.[11]
A few subsequent “gestures of
goodwill” have broken through the earlier “Cold War” standoff on cultural
restitution between Russia and Germany. In August 2001 the new Interagency
Council on Restitution approved the return of the 14th-century stained glass
panels held by the Hermitage from the Lutheran Church of St. Mary
(Marienkirche) in Frankfurt-on-Oder. The transfer will not take place for
another two years, however, given the long procedure of required documentation
and a promised exhibition in the Hermitage before return. In exchange Germany
will contribute a million and a half dollars towards the reconstruction of the
medieval Russian Orthodox Church of the Dormition of the Mother of God near
Novgorod that was destroyed during the war. The return comes under a paragraph
in the Russian law that permits restitution of property of religious
organizations in Germany.[12]
The Hermitage was also in the
restitution spotlight in February 2001, when the museum returned to Ukraine
several frescoes from the 12th-century cathedral of St. Michael of the Golden
Domes, looted by the Nazis from Kyiv in 1943, but held in Russia since their
return by the United States from Germany after World War II. That was the first
significant Russian act of restitution to one of the successor states since the
collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Controversy over this issue continues,
however, because still more important mosaics and frescoes from the church that
had been destroyed by Stalin in 1936 remain in Russia.[13]
Boris Yeltsin’s only gift of
trophy cultural treasures during presidential visits with German Chancellor
Helmut Kohl involved some symbolic archival files. While still legally blocked
from restitution of cultural treasures from state collections, Putin has
recently promoted a new series of “gestures of goodwill,” involving the return
from private Russian collections of trophy art seized after the war in Germany.
Most recently (27 September 2001) Putin was accompanied to Dresden by Russian
businessman Timur Timerbulatov, director of the large construction company
“Konti,” who presented the Dresden Gallery with three paintings acknowledged to
have been held there before the war. Curiously, all three (two 17th-century
paintings of the Flemish School and one by Max Slevogt painted in 1914)
reportedly had been purchased in the flea market in Moscow’s Izmailovo Park in
1992 from a private collector. Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, the
presentation took place a week after the Ukrainian Council of Ministers
approved the restitution of the long-lost Sing-Akademie collection of music
scores (including part of the Bach family archive) to Berlin (see below). As a
similar “gesture of goodwill” in Putin’s presence in April, at the palace of
Tsarskoe Selo near St. Petersburg Timerbulatov presented Germany the
17th-century painting “Heyduke” by Christopher Paudiss, also from the prewar
Dresden Gallery and also purchased in the Ismailovo market in 1992.[14]
It should be stressed that all of these
“gestures of goodwill” involve the restitution of art that had been recovered
from private collectors, not from state repositories, and hence they were not
subject to the new Russian law on cultural treasures. These recent transfers,
although only small steps in the light of the hundreds of German cultural treasures
remaining in Russian public and private collections, nevertheless give some
hope for more positive breakthroughs in the highly contested restitution issues
between Russia and Germany, as recently acknowledged by both sides. Yet if
restitution is going to move on a piece-by-piece barter basis, or occasional
“gestures of goodwill” on presidential encounters, it is going to take
centuries to resolve the issue. With this new emphasis on the return of German
cultural treasures from private Russian holdings, the Russian government holds
out the hope of bringing response from the German private sector. Already in
2000 in addition to the return of mosaics and commode from the Amber Chamber,
the Germans presented Putin with a 16th- century icon looted during the war
from the Pskov-Pokrovskii Monastery that recently surfaced in Germany.[15] But Germans are still concerned about the
major “trophy” holdings of their
cultural property in large state museums and other repositories. Libraries and
archives may retain a lesser spotlight, but restitution in those areas will
undoubtedly also need more stimulus from the new Russian policy of “gestures”
within the context of the international politics of restitution.
Trophy
Library Books. The
library world was shocked by the 1990 revelation about the millions of “trophy”
German books that had been left to rot under pigeon droppings in an abandoned
church in Uzkoe outside of Moscow, including many valuable early imprints from
famous collections.[16] Since that revelation there have been only two
library restitution transfers—both to the Netherlands in 1992—one of Dutch
books from the All-Russian State Library of Foreign Literature (VGBIL), and
another of European socialist literature from the former library of the
Institute of Marxism-Leninism (now the State Socio-Political Library—GPOB). A
Russo-German Library Roundtable, sponsored by VGBIL was held in December 1992.
A document released there gives the figure of eleven million trophy books
brought to the USSR from Germany after the war, but that figure does not
include those brought by other agencies or those that came intermixed with
archival shipments. Initially at that meeting directors of many Russian
libraries were not even prepared to admit that they held any trophy books at all,
and only gradually has the truth about trophy collections been surfacing.[17]
Since the end of
1992, however, the initial optimism about accommodation and possible
restitution waned, and there have been no further library transfers from
Russia. The growing Russian nationalist reaction led to the Duma prohibition of all cultural restitution in the spring
of 1994 until a new Russian law on the matter could be enacted. The Cold War
battle lines were drawn as German librarians (as if in reply to the prohibition)
published a volume of German translations of secret Soviet Trophy brigade
reports and related documents (many of them now classified in Moscow), several
of them documenting how many books (or crates) were taken from each of hundreds of German libraries and museums.[18]
Despite the
prohibition on restitution, some libraries have become more open about their
“trophy” holdings, and several descriptions have appeared in print. The trophy Gutenberg
Bible in the former Lenin Library (now the Russian State Library—RGB) came out
of hiding in 1994, with an article by Adrian Rudomino, the man who helped
engineer its transfer to Moscow and who was also featured in a Russian
television film on the spoils of war.[19] Since then, the Leninka (as the library is
still known in Moscow) has been publicizing more data about its extensive
trophy holdings. A senior RGB librarian addressed broader issues of trophy
books in a 2000 article directed to the library world honoring the “55th
Anniversary of the Great Victory,” ostensibly rejecting any idea of restitution
of their trophies, which (as explained in a headline caption) “indeed like all
of our holdings are part of our state heritage.” Another headline insert
explained that “in the treaties signed after the end of the Great Patriotic
War, there was no provision obliging the victors to return trophies to the
vanquished.”[20] Many such problems result from the fact that
no peace treaty was ever signed between the Soviet Union and Germany, and even
postwar border changes came by fiat rather than formalized international
treaties.
In contrast, the
Foreign Literature Library (VGBIL), now named after Margarita Rudomino, who had
led a Soviet trophy library brigade to Germany in 1945/1946, has become one of
the leaders of openness in Russia with respect to trophy holdings. VGBIL, led
by its director, Evgeniia Genieva, has long stressed the benefits of “gestures
of goodwill” in terms of restitution to libraries abroad. In addition to the
catalogue of Dutch books returned to the Netherlands, VGBIL has issued several
catalogues of its trophy holdings, including two volumes covering
sixteenth-century imprints and a database compendium of foreign book markings.[21] The VGBIL website, produced by its new Center
for the Study of Displaced Cultural Treasures, provides a virtual bulletin
board for Russian and related international developments. A catalogue appeared
in 1997 of the trophy collection of rare imprints from the Calvinist college of
Sárospatak in northwest Hungary, which surfaced in Nizhnii-Novgorod.[22] Books from that plundered Hungarian collection
were displayed in VGBIL during their April 2001 international seminar on
restitution issues—“Legislation and Gestures of Goodwill,” while the collection
itself remains one of the many restitution claims that seriously impede
Hungarian-Russian cultural relations. Appropriately, the conference bore the
title of the new Russian government restitution policy for the arts. However,
there were no similar “gestures” to report in the library world, and German
participants went home very discouraged about Russian government attitudes.[23]
An earlier VGBIL
conference in April 2000—the first international conference in Russia
addressing such issues—heard many relevant reports on “Displaced Cultural
Treasures in the New Millennium,” but the treasures themselves remain
displaced. Among the surprising revelations, 26 books from the Turgenev Library
in Paris have been identified in Voronezh. The director of the State Public
Historical Library (GPIB), Mikhail Afanas'ev, thereupon appealed that all books that had been seized by the
Nazis from the Turgenev Library and then ended up in Russia should be returned
to Paris, in tribute to the unique function of that library as an outpost of
Russian culture in the French capital. A specialist from the Ministry of
Culture later included Afanas'ev’s suggestion in a published article.[24] Subsequently the Ministry of Culture
authorized transfer of 118 books with stamps of the Turgenev Library,
identified in the GPOB. That collection had been a “gift” from the Polish
Communist Party in the early 1980s, so it was exempt from the new Russian law.
However, the export papers expired before the transfer could take place. Hence
not even a single symbolic volume was delivered to Paris by the Russian
delegation attending the Colloquium honoring the 125th Anniversary of the
Library in January 2001. Instead, the Mayor of Moscow sent an official gift of
500 recently published Russian books. Significantly at the Colloquium a
representative of RGB revealed for the first time that 3,400 books with
Turgenev Library stamps had been identified in her library (earlier such
holdings were denied), but so far no word about possible restitution has been
uttered.[25] In November 2001, the 118 books from GPOB
were transferred to the Russia Abroad Library Fund (Biblioteka-fond “Russkoe
zarubezh'e”) in Moscow, and on 12 February 2002 the Deputy Foreign Minister of
the Russian Federation formally presented them to the President of the Turgenev
Library Association and the Secretary General, who had flown in from Paris for
the occasion. The return of the books to Paris will be scheduled following the
close of an exhibition.
Captured
Archives and Restitution Negotiations. In February 1990 a Russian journalist’s
“Five Days in the Special Archive” (TsGOA SSSR—Central State Special Archive of
the USSR) first publicly revealed the extensive captured Nazi records there,
less than a year after she had reported that the long-suppressed “death books”
and other Auschwitz (Oświęcim) concentration camp records had finally been turned over to
the Red Cross.[26] But it was another year and a half before the
world knew that there were also captured state and private archives from
countries all over Europe in Moscow, including long-lost French intelligence
records. In an October 1991 interview with me a Russian journalist friend first
revealed over seven linear kilometers of French records that had been hidden
for half a century; a week later the director of the top-secret “Special
Archive” confirmed and elaborated on the findings of the “well-known ‘archival’
spy Grimsted.”[27] Euphemistically rebaptized the Center for the
Preservation of Historico-Documentary Collections—(TsKhIDK) in 1992, in March
1999 it was abolished as a separate repository and, now even symbolically,
incorporated into the neighboring Russian State Military Archive (RGVA).[28]
Soon after the
story of captured French records became front-page news in Paris, the director
of the Archives Nationales queried his Russian counterpart, “How soon can we
send transport to pick up our archives?”[29] The answer turned out to take ten years.
Nevertheless, restitution in the archival world from Russia—and earlier from
the Soviet Union—has fared much better than has been the case with art and
library books. A bilateral agreement for archival restitution was signed
between France and the Russian Federation in November 1992, but only about
two-thirds of the archives of French provenance were returned to France before
the Duma embargo on restitution in May 1994. [30] The latest segment of the twice-plundered
archives from France were turned over to French authorities in October 2000,
but negotiations continue for the remaining French claims.[31] The official authorizing resolution of the
Duma for the resumption of transfers in 1998 called it an “exchange” rather
than restitution: indeed France paid approximately half a million dollars and
turned over to Russia some original files of Russian provenance in exchange.[32] A few fonds of French provenance remain in the
former Special Archive, now part of RGVA, but not all of the archival materials
from France in other archives have even been identified, nor have any of the
books and museum exhibits.
Liechtenstein
(July 1997) and Great Britain (July 1998) are the only two other countries to
have received their archives from Moscow since 1991. In both cases, an act of
the Russian Duma was also required. Approximately half of the entire archives
of the Grand Duchy (predominantly seventeenth- and eighteenth-century records)
had been seized in Vienna by Soviet authorities in 1945. First placed in the
Library of the Academy of Sciences (BAN) in 1945, but then transferred to
TsGOA, the fond with estate records of the Grand Duchy was virtually forgotten
until the early 1990s. Restitution to Liechtenstein was approved by the Duma
(after initial refusal) only when
there was a significant “exchange” of documentation relating to the 1918
assassination of the Russian imperial family, which the Prince of Liechtenstein
agreed to purchase from Sotheby’s. A Vaduz newspaper at the time of the
transfer appropriately complained that the Grand Duchy had been forced “to
repurchase its archival heritage.”[33]
Many millions of
files “saved by the Soviet Army” had been restituted to Eastern-bloc countries
before 1991, always positively portrayed as the Soviet role of “helping other
countries reunify their national archival heritage.”[34] But that internationalist policy was abandoned
since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Initial archival restitution agreements
signed in 1992 with the Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Hungary, and Germany have
still not resulted in actual transfers, and so those archives still remain
prisoners of war.[35] Rosarkhiv Deputy Chairman Vladimir Tarasov has
spoken out at several conferences regarding post-1991 Russian archival
restitution developments, with examples of the transfers to France and
Liechtenstein, although he avoids the term “restitution.”[36] His remarks reflect the
Rosarkhiv point of view that most important for Russia in the return of other
nations’ archives seized by Soviet authorities after World War II is the
receipt in “exchange” of important components of archival Rossica, i.e. lost
fragments of the Russian archival legacy dispersed abroad.[37] He accompanied then Rosarkhiv Deputy Chief
Vladimir Kozlov to the 1994 CITRA meeting in Thessalonica, where Russia was one
of only three countries to abstain from the concluding resolution declaring
that archives should not be used as trophies or objects of exchange.
The
New Russian Legal Framework for Restitution
Recent
Legal Developments.
It has taken ten years since the revelations about displaced cultural treasures
for the Russian Federation to develop a legal basis and procedures for
processing restitution claims, but still most of the trophy cultural property
and archives held in Russia have not been openly described. The Duma
prohibition on further restitution of cultural treasures brought to Russia as a
result of World War II was predicated on the need for a new law dealing with
the matter. After three years of bitter debate, in May 1997 the Russian
parliament almost unanimously passed the law that potentially nationalizes all
cultural treasures brought to Russia at the end of World War II—passed a
second time over President Yeltsin’s veto. After Yeltsin was forced to sign the
law in April 1998, the Constitutional Court upheld the text in a July 1999
ruling, but pointed out a number of legal irregularities.[38] President Putin signed a law providing a
number of amendments in May 2000. In what could be termed a new version, the
law now reinforces the prohibition of restitution of cultural property to
Germany and the Axis powers (except in exceptional cases), but provides for the
potential restitution under specified conditions to countries that fought
against the Nazi regime and to those victimized by the Nazis.[39] Specified conditions for restitution include
provisions for high financial charges by the Russian side, including storage,
appraisal, and processing fees.
A Regulation (postanovlenie) of the Government of the
Russian Federation (2 December 2000—no. 913) puts the Ministry of Culture in
charge of processing restitution. Subsequently, another Government Regulation
(11 March 2001—no. 174) established and named the members of a new Interagency
Council on Restitution with offices under the Ministry of Culture with
procedures for management of cultural trophies and processing potential claims.
Minister of Culture Mikhail E. Shvydkoi chairs the Council and Chief Archivist
of Russia and Chairman of Rosarkhiv Vladimir P. Kozlov serves as Deputy Chair.
The Council includes the directors of major museums and also Nikolai N.
Gubenko, who shepherded the nationalization law through the Duma, where he now
chairs the Committee on Culture.[40] Each act of restitution must now be approved
by the Interagency Council. Once approved by the Council and an appropriate
agreement with the holding repository (usually RGVA for archives) or Rosarkhiv
is in place, a government regulation is still required for export.
The
New Law in Action.
So far three cases of archives have been approved by the Council, but by
mid-December 2001, only the first and part of the second have actually been
realized. The return of the Rothschild family papers confiscated by the Nazis
from Vienna was approved in May after almost four years of negotiations. But
that restitution is in fact a remarkable “exchange” for a collection of over
5,000 love letters of Russian Emperor Alexander II to his morganatic wife,
Princess Ekaterina [Catherine] Dolgorukii (E. M. Iur'eva), purchased from
Christie’s in 1999 by the Rothschild family for the prospective “barter” (the
asking price was $250,000). The family papers from Austria held in Moscow were
turned over to the director of the Rothschild Archive at the end of November
2001, who personally conveyed them to London, where they join other parts of
the family archives.[41] The much larger group of records of the French
branch of the family confiscated by the Nazis and likewise captured by Soviet
authorities in Silesia, were recently returned to France and have now also been
deposited in the Rothschild Archive in London. Potentially the latest
Rothschild restitution is of tremendous importance, because it could open the
road for the return of many more groups of twice plundered Jewish and Masonic
records initially confiscated by the Nazis from “enemies of the regime”
(including many Holocaust victims) in Austria and other Axis countries.
However, Rosarkhiv officials say they are not prepared for that eventuality,
emphasizing that the Rothschild “exchange” was a special private arrangement
and should not be seen as a precedent for the restitution of other archival
materials from Germany, Austria, or other countries that were allied with the
Nazis during the war, many of which remain in the former Special Archive.
A second case
involves the Netherlands, following up on an abortive 1992 agreement for the
return of Dutch archives. During Queen
Beatrix’s visit to Moscow in early June 2001, she and Russian President
Vladimir Putin issued a joint declaration announcing that 31 archival fonds of
Dutch provenance were to be restituted to the Netherlands by the end of 2001,
although not even a symbolic file was transferred at the time.[42] Negotiations continued as to how much the
Dutch government should pay Rosarkhiv, including payment for microfilming,
although many of the materials involved have already been filmed at Dutch
expense. The Dutch government found itself in a difficult position, because
almost all of the non-governmental Dutch institutions involved held strongly to
the position that they should not have to pay to retrieve their legitimate
archival heritage. (Ironically, many of the archives had been seized by the
Nazis during 1940 and early 1941 while the USSR was still allied with the Nazi
regime.) The transfers were further delayed because the former Special Archive had inadequate descriptions of the
Dutch records, but during September and October of 2001, Dutch specialists
assisted the descriptive process in RGVA. A ceremony announcing transfer of the
initial 22 fonds took place in Moscow on 6 December 2001, but even by the time
of the formal transfer ceremony in the Hague on 30 January 2002 attended by
Russian archive leaders, unfortunately the additional 9 of the agreed-upon
fonds did not arrive. Their return is promised for later in the spring.
Third, the Interagency Council approved the
restitution of Belgian archives from RGVA at the end of August 2001, bringing
to a new climax negotiations that have dragged on for almost ten years. Then in
November, word came through that the Ministry of Culture had issued a decree in
preparation for higher Russian Government approval for the return of a
specified 40 fonds of Belgian provenance. However, again, the terms of payment
to Rosarkhiv (and RGVA) were the subject of exceedingly difficult negotiations,
and the Belgian government was obliged to pay fifty-year “storage charges” for
materials they did not even know (until recently) had been preserved and
“microfilming charges” for materials many of which had already been microfilmed
at Belgian expense six years ago. Besides, Rosarkhiv was pressing for barter of
archival materials of alleged Russian provenance in Belgium, despite the fact
they remain in private hands. Finally in early December 2001, a compromise was
agreed. After yet another required Russian government decree, it is to be hoped
that the Belgian archives will soon be on their way home. The return of related
books and printed materials identified by Belgian specialists in the former
Special Archive has yet to pass “further professional scrutiny,” and Rosarkhiv
claims inadequate proof of ownership (especially for those lacking stamps) has
been put forward by the Belgian side. Belgian specialists have not yet been
permitted to examine or file a formal claim for files of alleged Belgian
provenance in two other Moscow archives.[43]
Negotiations
continue with Greece, but that case has not reached the Interagency Council.
Greek specialists might have hoped that Putin’s visit to Greece in early
December 2001 might have brought a breakthrough, but the displaced Greek
archives in Moscow were not on the presidential agenda.[44] Croatia
is still working on a formal claim for a few groups of Jewish records recently
identified, and specialists from several other countries, including Norway,
Hungary, and Luxemburg, have been trying to identify displaced files in Moscow. Polish archivists working with Russian
colleagues have prepared a new guide to fonds of Polish provenance (see below),
but diplomatic arrangements for their return appear to stagnate despite a
Russo-Polish agreement providing for restitution in 1992. Restitution to Poland
is technically not covered by the new Russian law, because most of the Polish
records in Moscow were seized before World War II or were produced during
the prerevolutionary period when a large part of Polish lands were part of the
Russian Empire. Polish archival authorities are currently concentrating
on mutual restitution negotiations with Ukraine.
Thus, experience
of the last five years since Russia signed the Council of Europe “intents” shows little hope for “rapid” return
of archives to the countries of their provenance, although there is some
progress. Negotiations are long and often exasperating; costs to the receiving country (as
prescribed within the new Russian law) run high; and usually Rosarkhiv tries to
exact some archival Rossica in return. Rosarkhiv reportedly now intends to move
more carefully in restitution matters, since it was discovered that some files
of Belgian and German origin were mistakenly returned to France. At the same
time foreign negotiators are struck by increasing complications, decreasing “goodwill,”
and the extent to which Rosarkhiv appears to “barter” with their foreign
“trophy” archives as a means of compensating for archival budget shortfalls and
trying to regain alienated archival Rossica abroad.
Inventorization of Cultural “Trophies.” As another important new
development at the end of March 2001, the Ministry of Culture issued a decree (prikaz) ordering all cultural
institutions to undertake a full accounting of their trophy holdings (including
archives). Minimal descriptive components were outlined for museum exhibits and
books, while Rosarkhiv was to provide instructions for archival materials
(manuscript books and archival documents). The Ministry is suggesting the need
for identification on the level of individual books and documentary units, but
librarians and archivists point out that would take decades. As of September
2001, Rosarkhiv reports that the descriptive level is still under negotiation,
and it is not clear which federal archives will be included. VGBIL has already
prepared an item-level catalogue of the collection of rare books from the
Sárospatak Calvinist College, but now inexplicably the Ministry is
negotiating a new contract for their description by the holding library in Nizhnii Novgorod. Plans call for
inventorization to be completed during 2001–2002 and the database to be
formulated by the fall of 2002, but as things appeared in Moscow in fall 2001,
those dates are as unrealistic as the identification of all displaced
treasures. According to the decree the displaced treasures are not to be
displayed during the inventorization period without permission of the Ministry,
and special permission is also required (at least in the case of museums and
libraries under the Ministry) for the participation of foreigners in their identification.[45]
The Ministry of Culture calls
for a special catalogue to be prepared from the database to be printed and
circulated on the Internet. Once the special catalogue is published, “foreign
countries or individual citizens will have 18 months to file claims in
accordance with the Federal Law on Displaced Cultural Treasures.” Those not
claimed will become federal property to be registered accordingly. The
inventorization project covers
those cultural treasures
(currently held in state repositories) that were displaced in implementation of
compensatory restitution from the territories of Germany and her former
military allies—Bulgaria, Hungary, Italy, Romania, and Finland to the USSR,
under the authority of orders from military commanders of the Soviet Army, the
Soviet Military Administration in Germany, or directives of other competent
agencies of the USSR, or in accordance with decisions of the Committee for
Cultural and Educational Institutions under the Council of People’s Commissars.
But what about the many
freight wagon loads of books and archives (and musicalia as we will see
below)—among them many “twice-plundered”—that were directed to Moscow from
Silesia? (That area was part of Germany until the end of the war, but with
redrawn postwar borders became part of Poland.) Most non-German archival
materials now in RGVA were seized by Soviet authorities from Nazi hideaways in Silesia and the Sudetenland, having been
evacuated from the Berlin area after Western Allied bombing intensified in
1943. If cultural property (including “German”) from those areas is not
inventoried, there is no way of knowing which items might have come from
Holocaust victims in Western Europe, in Germany or in other Axis countries. It
will be important to follow the extent to which the new “Research Project for
Art and Archives” mentioned above will be meshed with these new Ministry
descriptive efforts in terms of the cultural property of Holocaust victims.
According to the Ministry instructions, however, cultural treasures that were
“displaced to the Soviet Union as gifts or purchase, or even personal trophies
of individual service men or citizens” are not to be included in the database;
these, as is explained, are to be regulated under the Civil Codex of the Russian
Federation and the federal law “On the Import and Export of Cultural
Treasures.”[46]
It is not clear to what extent
repositories will (or even will be obliged to) describe all cultural valuables
that are already registered as state property. Many books and archival
materials seized by Soviet authorities after the war—many of them with clearly
displayed stamps or other markings of ownership—were in fact integrated into
the main holdings of state libraries and archives. Claims in such cases are
nonetheless anticipated by the Ministry of Culture—as the instructions explain,
“in case of the approved confirmation of concrete pretensions on the part of a
foreign state or citizen proprietor, they will be excluded from their
now-assigned status in the state fond as having been incorrectly registered.”[47]
According to the Ministry,
Russian repositories are being encouraged to report provenance and migratory
data (if known), and not only the source of acquisition. But such information
would require years of technical “provenance” research, and the data needed are
not always readily available, especially in Russia. As trophy shipments were
often so jumbled as to proprietary source and their contents so widely
dispersed after arrival in the USSR, it will often be exceedingly difficult to
determine their prewar origin and proprietor. Given the immensity of the
descriptive task, it is unlikely today’s librarians, museum curators, and
archivists will have the long hours needed in archives outside their own
repositories or for consultation with colleagues abroad. Besides, many
documentary sources regarding the seizure and disposition of cultural treasures
and even their previous descriptions are still classified, and there is no
evidence of increased declassification efforts in this respect. A Russo-German
joint project has started to describe the records of the Soviet Military
Administration in Germany (SVAG), but records of the Property Division
(involved in many trophy and restitution transfers) remain closed (along with
related documents originating with SVAG in other record groups). Likewise the
reports to Communist Party authorities about trophy musicalia, already
published in German translation, are still classified in two different former
Communist Party archives in Moscow.
World War II
Captured Records in Russia—Then and Now
Trophy Archives—Quantity. Archives constitute a very small, but
nonetheless very important, percentage of the overall Soviet WWII cultural
plunder. Only in the past decade has it been possible to piece together the
extensive Soviet archival retrieval and plunder operations, but still there are
no reliable data about how many trophy files from how many different groups of
institutional records or personal papers were transferred to the USSR.[48]
Estimating the quantity of archives is still virtually
impossible. Various shipments were measured alternately in freight cars,
crates, or tons; we do not know how tightly the freight cars were packed, and
in many instances they had to be reloaded at the Soviet frontier. The size of
crates varied tremendously; many of them included printed books and art, in one
case, nine freight cars of steel shelving, and another, a printing press. One
top-secret report of the Main Archival Administration under the NKVD (Glavarkhiv)
for 1945, for example, notes 55 wagon-loads of German and Romanian materials
and 44 wagon-loads of other foreign materials (predominantly French and Polish)
brought to Moscow during the year, but those figures diverge from or do not
include those reported elsewhere.[49]
Scattered trophy
archival receipts from Germany continued through the end of the 1940s, as
specialists working with the Soviet Military Administration in Germany and
Austria combed archives in their zones of occupation for appropriate materials
to send to Moscow. Transfers ranged from German aeronautic patent files to
documentation on the German labor movement and émigré socialists,
from seventeenth-century charters to reports on Russian military operations
during the Napoleonic wars. Unfortunately, many of the available precise
descriptions of those transfers and their Soviet destinations are still
classified.[50] And displaced archival fragments of the
European cultural heritage were scattered so widely in the former USSR that it
is unlikely they will all ever be found and identified.
Categories of Captured Records. Soviet captured records can, for the purpose of analysis,
be classified provisionally into eight principal categories (sometimes with
overlap):
(1) official records
of the Nazi regime itself—with three subcategories:
(a) central state
agencies,
(b) local
occupation authorities, and
(c) technical and
scientific documentation, including factory records transferred with factories
or equipment from German research institutions;
(2) records, manuscript collections, and personal
papers of German Jewish, Masonic, and other private institutions and
individuals earlier confiscated by Nazi agencies; some of these were returned
to East Germany during the Soviet regime;
(3) “trophy” pre-Nazi German archival materials of
predominantly historical interest; many of these also were returned to East
Germany:
(a) records of
official state agencies, and
(b) manuscript
collections, such as musicalia and other cultural archives;
(4) displaced official
state (including police and military) records of other European nations, most
of which had previously been seized by Nazi agencies;
(5) records,
manuscript collections, and personal papers of non-German Jewish, Masonic, and
other private or community institutions and individuals, almost all of which
had been previously seized by Nazi agencies from “enemies of the regime” in
occupied territories;
(6) records,
manuscript collections, and personal papers from Eastern European states and
private organizations, with two subcategories:
(a) other Axis nations, such as
Romania, Hungary, and Austria, that had been allied with the Nazi regime; some
records from these countries were considered vital because of their historical
links with areas newly annexed to the Soviet Union, such as Galicia, Bukovina,
Transcarpathia, and Moldova, and
(b) Polish records, because of
their relevance to the newly annexed western Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania,
many of which had been seized already in 1939–1940;
(7) files relating to the
international socialist-revolutionary, and especially Communist, movement. Many
of these had been previously seized by Nazi authorities; others were removed
from state archives in East Germany and Austria during Soviet occupation; and
(8) records, manuscript collections, and personal
papers of Russian and Ukrainian émigré groups and organizations,
or other files directly related to Russian or Soviet issues, some of which had
also been seized by Nazi agencies. Within this category of materials, often
termed “archival Rossica,” are three subcategories:
(a) those seized by Soviet authorities
from Germany and Eastern Europe;
(b) those previously seized by Nazi
agencies; and
(c)
the
special category of “gift” such as the materials from the Russian Foreign
Historical Archive in Prague (RZIA).
All of the above categories of archival
materials were seized by Soviet authorities during or in the aftermath of World
War II, and hence could be considered “captured records.” But Russian
archivists today would not consider all of them “trophies,” and especially not
the last three categories. Thus terminology and definition also become
important.
Captured
Records for “Operational” Use. Unlike art and library books, but very similarly to Nazi
archival plunder, most of the Soviet archival seizures were hardly carried out
as compensation restitution. Instructions for the seizure of archives were
prepared by the NKVD already in February 1945: Beria recommended to Molotov a special
mission “to search thoroughly through all German archives and libraries to
effect means of preservation and bring to the Soviet Union materials, including
printed editions, that have scientific-historical and operational significance
for our country.”[51] Captured records brought to Moscow under
Beria’s orders, however, were principally for operational analysis: to identify
war criminals, Soviet citizens who had collaborated with the Nazi regime, and
individuals or émigré groups that might be potential “anti-Soviet,”
“bourgeois nationalist,” “counterrevolutionary elements,” or foreign enemies of
the Soviet state, among others. Archival seizures were also made by military
intelligence, counterintelligence (SMERSH), and other authorities, but the
security services usually had first choice of the spoils. Today, however, these
are also included in the “compensatory reparations” category and subject to
restitution (or not) under the terms of the new law.
There were,
nonetheless, some compensatory “trophies,” or archival materials of
“scientific-historical” significance to be “saved” or “preserved” among the
vast captured records transported to Moscow. The Red Army “trophy” brigades
that set off to Germany did bring back many manuscript books and rare incunabula
from famous German collections, Oriental manuscripts, films, folklore
recordings, the medieval Hanseatic archives from Bremen, Hamburg, and
Lübeck, to say nothing of all the documents relating to Marx and the
international Socialist movement that they could lay their hands on.[52] The “trophy” archival materials of those
categories went to historical or literary archives, libraries, and museums for
appropriate “preservation.” Many of them, however, as “trophies” of foreign
provenance went to special secret sections. They were never fully described and
registered as part of the collections of the holding repository, and rarely
open for public research. Those of foreign provenance needed for operational
analysis (except the last two categories), if they stayed with Glavarkhiv and
were not siphoned off by the security services themselves, went to the Special
Archive.
The Special Archive for Soviet Captured
Records. That
formerly top-secret facility (officially TsGOA SSSR) was founded in March 1946
especially to house Soviet captured foreign records. It was initially organized
with four divisions, according to language of the major groups of records
involved—French, German, Polish, and Romanian. Subsequently the Romanian
division became inactive, when many of its intended holdings were dispersed to
other Soviet repositories. The 15 remaining fonds of Romanian provenance are
listed in print.[53]
Researchers
complain today about the lack of finding aids, and specialists preparing claims
are frustrated by the frequent lack of appropriate archival processing. Such
complaints were already anticipated in a top-secret discussion of the
establishment of the Special Archive in August 1945, where the recommendations
of one NKVD captain became the norm:
Use [of that archive], in my opinion, should have an
exclusively specific, limited character, namely utilization only for operational aims of the NKVD, VD, MO
[Defense], and ID [Foreign Affairs]. No scholarly research whatsoever can be
carried out on the basis of that archive, and to be sure, no access whatsoever
can be permitted for representatives of any scholarly institutions. . . . There
is no need for compiling full inventories (opisi),
nor is there need for arranging the files [according to archival principles].
The only immediate need is to use the documents there for operational purposes.[54]
That
attitude and the priorities it laid out well explain why many of the materials
were never better processed, why many were never accurately identified in terms
of provenance, and why so many of their opisi
are so inadequate. Soviet archivists accessioning those records had no time for
determining provenance or recording whence they came. Indeed, it was safer not
to know, and especially not to ask questions about the foreign acquisitions.
Many of the materials that arrived as jumbled collections from a single source
were broken down into multiple fonds that completely obscure their provenance.
Many materials not needed for “operational utilization” were never properly
arranged in fonds, as
distinct groups of records are known in Russian, and their description was
never completed. Hence many vast collections remain with files of miscellaneous
provenance (for example from Jewish and Masonic organizations), sometimes
provisionally grouped according to country of provenance, although such
attributions are not always correct. As for example, a 1964 preface to a survey
(obzor) for one fond that contains
files from three Dutch Jewish organizations (along with a few stray files from
Thessalonica) states, “Since the documentary material does not have scientific
or practical value, further processing work on the fond was not undertaken.”[55] Many original foreign-language names of
creating institutions were never carefully verified. Some “unneeded” records
were destroyed in waste-paper campaigns. Other integral groups of records were
fragmented and distributed among many different archives or other agencies.
Printed books that arrived with the
archives went to various libraries, but many of the transfers are virtually
impossible to document. Over 60,000 inadequately processed volumes are still
held by the successor RGVA, where Belgian specialists recently identified 1,200
with book stamps or other markings of Belgian provenance. RGVA archivists are
not prepared to turn them over to Belgium before further bibliographic
expertise. Three hundred and forty Torah scrolls and 240 crates of Masonic
portraits and regalia were transferred to the State Historical Museum from the
Special Archive in 1946, but as yet their fate has not been determined.
Holdings from TsGOA SSSR Today (now part
of RGVA). Trophy
holdings from the former TsGOA itself have been open to specialists since 1992,
although the reading room was closed for two months in the summer of 2001. As
of fall 2001, holdings from the former Special Archive still totalled slightly
over 600 fonds (captured records groups or collections) from all over Europe.
Following the most recent transfers to France, that figure is down from the
approximately 850 fonds reported in 1997.
It is most difficult for
researchers today that no comprehensive list of fonds is available. Archivists
there have been working intermittently on a systematic guide, but the archive has
had no funds to pay the specialists with the foreign-language skills needed. A
dubious contract with an outside enterprise hoping to profit from the sale of
copies of documents proved an inadequate substitute. Rosarkhiv had to order the
removal of their unprofessional Internet listings in 1998.[56] Simultaneously, the archive itself prepared a
provisional list of fonds, which was readied for publication with German
sponsorship already in 1998, but publication was being delayed.[57] The list identifies most of the fonds with
foreign holdings, including those previously returned to their countries of
provenance, and hence, even in preliminary form, should be essential for
potential researchers. The Rosarkhiv list includes much less data than is
available in other sources for many fonds. Rosarkhiv is apparently hesitant to
publish the list because of its many inaccuracies, and now that restitution to
the Netherlands is underway and Belgian restitution is officially approved,
further reediting will be required. Researchers and potential claimants will
still need a more detailed guide with annotations of fonds and indication as to
where the materials were found by Soviet authorities or when (and whence) they
were acquired.
The fact that the Special
Archive was never developed as a research institution is understandably the
basis of its problems. Many of its reference facilities were developed for
operational rather than research use, and that legacy persists, which may
explain why many of the auxiliary reference reports about the holdings,
including vital data about acquisitions and transfers to other repositories,
are still not available to researchers. Since opening to the public in 1992,
the archive has been severely under-staffed, has recently been without heating on
occasion, and archivists have been busy processing materials already designated
for restitution and prisoner-of-war inquiries. That may explain why the
administrative records of the former TsGOA itself is still not processed, and
hence cannot be declassified. But understanding why such sources are closed
does not quell the need or clamor for more openness on the part of researchers
and potential claimants.
Specialists from
various countries have already surveyed records of specific national
provenance. A German pseudo-guide was published hastily in 1993 listing fonds
from the German-language sector, which also included those from Austria and
other countries.[58] Well-annotated guides to holdings of Austrian,[59] Belgian,[60] and Polish[61] provenance have been prepared in cooperation
with specialists from those countries, in addition to the coverage of Romanian
fonds mentioned earlier. Belgian listings were particularly problematic because
TsGOA archivists tended to assign fonds on the basis of language, with the result
that Belgian holdings often were mixed with French or Dutch ones, or else left
as part of “collections” of mixed provenance. Dutch specialists prepared an
updated list of fonds of Dutch provenance for the purpose of claims, but they
keep finding still more Dutch files, such as those for Masonic and Jewish
documentation that were never properly arranged according to agency of
provenance or collection from which they came. In the fall of 2001 they
assisted RGVA archivists in identifying and describing Dutch holdings, so that
the agreed-upon restitution to the Netherlands could proceed.[62]
Dispersal
of Trophy Archives.
Aside from the former Special Archive, much less information is available as to
what foreign “trophy” archival materials are held in other Russian archives.
Some repositories or specialized agencies received “trophy” archival materials
directly after arrival in the USSR, but other materials were transferred from
TsGOA to other institutions. It is not clear how many of other federal archives
and agencies archives will be included in the official inventorization under
the Ministry of Culture. Some current federal archival directors and other
archivists are not even aware of the extent of their trophy holdings or whence
they came, nor do they want to be reminded.
Significant trophy
archives are still held by NKVD/MVD agency archives and those of the KGB
successors, the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) and the Federal Security
Service (FSB), but it is doubtful that those agencies will make information
about their holdings public. For example, some files with lists of Nazi
concentration-camp guards (some of whom were Soviet citizens) held in one
trophy collection by the FSB (of Nazi provenance and hence not eligible for
restitution) have been made available for the prosecution in war crimes trials
in Canada and the United States. But even in connection with such official
legal proceedings, the FSB was unwilling to reveal its sources.
A preliminary
guide to holdings of the postrevolutionary Archive of the Foreign Policy of the
Russian Federation (AVP RF) under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was expected
in the fall of 2001. But the Foreign Ministry denies it has any displaced or
“trophy” holdings.[63] To be sure, “recovered” Russian diplomatic
files that were retrieved with other captured records should not be described
as such. But what about the files from the Nazi Foreign Office, and diplomatic
files from Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia, and other countries that were among the
archives transferred to the USSR after World War II? In some cases a paper
trail confirms transfer to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, including files
already described in print from the Russian Foreign Historical Archive (RZIA)
in Prague (see below), and hence further investigation of their fate will be
required.
Many military
records from the former Special Archive have been returned to France and a few
to the Netherlands, while those of Belgian provenance were approved for return
in the fall of 2001. But we still do not know how many important files were
sifted out to Soviet military agencies and may now remain in the Central
Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation (TsAMO) in Podol'sk (outside of Moscow) or others under the General Staff.
Trophy holdings in military intelligence archives can only be surmised.
Many of the
socialist materials brought back to the USSR after the war were turned over to
the Central Party Archive of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism (TsPA, now the
Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History—RGASPI). For example, the
papers of German socialist Ferdinand Lassalle, retrieved by a Soviet trophy
brigade in a Saxon salt mine went there, given their important Marxist
correspondence. That was one of the first “trophy” fonds to have been publicly
identified in TsPA.[64] Later also transferred from the Special
Archive were some of the Nazi pre-1940 police investigatory files regarding
socialists in France and other countries, along with a few files of the French
security services regarding Paris visits of Soviet dignitaries such as the
Comintern General Secretary Georgi Dimitrov.[65] Many individual files from French and German
security agencies, especially those relating to the German Communist Party,
were transferred to East Germany during the Soviet period.
Other socialist
materials when deposited in the Central Party Archive often arrived with
inadequate data as to their origin and migration, were intermingled with
materials from other sources, and now form part of various fonds in RGASPI. In
1947 the Special Archive forwarded what was then called the “fond of the
Socialist Workers’ International” to the Institute of Marxism-Leninism (IML)
because, as explained in the covering letter, it “had historico-scientific
interest, but could not be used for operational-security work.” Today, it has
not yet been possible precisely to verify the actual materials involved in
RGASPI.[66]
Possibly at least
part of those “trophy” socialist materials went to the Central State Archive of
the October Revolution (TsGAOR SSSR) rather than the Party Archive, since today
a fragmentary fond by that name is held by the successor State Archive of the
Russian Federation (GA RF). This and another collection of editorial materials
probably came from the collections of the Paris Branch of the International
Institute of Social History (IISH), directed before the war by Boris
Nikolaevskii.[67] Many of the records of the Second
International had already been moved to and formally deposited in the Paris
Branch of the IISH before the war. However, some remained in Brussels at the
outbreak of the war and were immediately seized there by Nazi agents, together
with personal papers of the secretary of the Second International, Frederich
Adler.[68] A list of archival and library materials
confiscated by the Rosenberg Special Command Force for Occupied Territories
(ERR) in Paris that was recently uncovered in Kyiv specifies 144 crates of
archival materials seized from the Paris Branch of the IISH—and an additional
15 crates of materials from the Office of the Second International.[69] We do not yet know how many of those crates
stayed with the ERR during the war or how many were turned over to the Reich
Security Main Office (RSHA) and were evacuated to Silesia where they were
seized a second time by Soviet authorities. Russian archivists may want to
attribute the acquisition of that fond and related socialist materials to RZIA
from Prague. Clearly, however, available documentation suggests that many of
them came from Paris, and hence further investigation of acquisition and
wartime transfer records is required.
TsGAOR SSSR was
the designated recipient of documentation of Russian émigré
origin from RZIA with vast
documentation from the revolutionary and Civil War period, including papers of
exiled Russian Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary Party activists. Nine
sealed freight wagons of archival materials arrived in Moscow from Prague in
early January 1946. That highly-prized “gift of the Czech government to the
Academy of Sciences of the USSR” (as announced by a “special file” to Stalin)
was immediately turned over to TsGAOR which established a special secret
division for the RZIA collections.[70] As a duly designated “gift,” Russian
archivists today do not consider RZIA among “trophy” holdings. Today the rich émigré
materials from RZIA and other sources in Prague are valued as Russia’s lost or
exiled émigré culture, but in May 1946, NKVD Security chief
Kruglov assured Zhdanov that “access for scholars would be closed,” and the
documents “would be expeditiously analyzed for data on anti-Soviet activities
of the White emigration to be used in operational work of organs of the
Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) and the Ministry of State Security (MGB).[71] Many of the millions of card files compiled by
Soviet archivists (then under the NKVD/MVD) and other specialized security
agencies are now open for public research in GA RF, testifying to the extent of
the program, but we do not know how many people perished or were incarcerated
as a result of those investigations.[72] Subsequently holdings from RZIA were dispersed
in at least thirty repositories throughout the former USSR, but a recent
inter-repository guide describes most of the now dispersed collections.
Apparently the Foreign Ministry does not consider the RZIA materials as
“trophy” archives, but five fonds in the prerevolutionary Foreign Ministry
archive (AVPRI) are listed in the new guide as having files from RZIA. Those
sent to non-Russian republics include five fonds sent to Belarus and fifty-five
sent to Ukraine, although several other fonds of Ukrainian provenance with
files from RZIA remain in GA RF.[73]
Much more
complicated is the task of identifying the unmistakable “trophy” origin of many
of the émigré holdings seized after the war from other
sources—and indeed from many other countries (Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and France,
for example)—that were subsequently deposited and intermixed with RZIA holdings
in TsGAOR. Many papers of Pavel Miliukov, Viktor Chernov, and Boris
Nikolaevskii that were confiscated by the Nazis in Paris, for example, came to
the Special Archive with the previously Nazi-plundered RSHA cache from Silesia
and were subsequently transferred to TsGAOR. In the case of Miliukov, TsGAOR
also received the now separate archive of the interwar émigré
newspaper Poslednie novosti, which
Miliukov edited, along with 7,143 books from his Paris library.[74] Russian archivists today, in identifying them
as retrieved archival Rossica, do not use the term “trophy,” nor do they
consider them candidates for restitution. Many of those Nazi-confiscated files
are still incorrectly identified in GA RF as having come with the RZIA “gift”
from Prague.[75]
Russian archivists
are so committed to the retrieval of archival Rossica from émigré
sources that they often refuse to consider restitution of materials clearly
created abroad that rightfully belong to foreign repositories, even when there
is convincing documentation that they were confiscated by Nazi agencies. For
example, in connection with the recently approved Dutch restitution, among the
files from IISH that remain in Moscow, Rosarkhiv disallowed the restitution of
a folder of correspondence of Boris Nikolaevskii, who served as director of the
Paris Branch of IISH before the war.[76] Many of his personal papers were seized with those
of the Paris IISH Branch, the Second International, and related socialist
sources in Paris and Amboise. Undoubtedly, this file from the IISH collection
was left behind in TsGOA when other papers of Nikolaevskii were transferred to
TsGAOR in 1946. A large fond of Nikolaevskii papers is now held in GA RF
(former TsGAOR SSSR), part of which
have been identified as having been confiscated by the Nazis from Paris.[77] But apparently Dutch archivists (like those
from Belgium) did not have the possibility of claiming any files now in
GA RF.
Recently, for
example, GA RF archivists helped me identify two fonds with administrative
records from the Turgenev Library in Paris, and several more from the Petliura
Ukrainian Library, some of which were earlier incorrectly labelled as coming
from RZIA. Actually, most of those files were transferred to TsGAOR from the
Lenin Library in 1948, along with some papers of Vladimir Burtsev and editorial
files of the journal Byloe that he
edited in Paris, at least some of which had apparently been deposited in the
Turgenev Library just before the war. A few contingent files (still
undescribed) of Turgenev Library administrative records remain today in the
Manuscript Division of RGB.[78] While the wartime fate and migration of those
two Paris libraries has now been better documented, distinguishing the
provenance of all the archival materials involved has been exceedingly
difficult. Indicative of the tragic postwar dispersal, additional archival
materials from the Petliura Library are now held in RGVA (received by TsGOA
from Minsk) and others are dispersed between two major archives in Kyiv. The
fonds from the Petliura Library archival collections that are now held in RGVA
(many with files contingent to those in GA RF ) were listed on the approved
list of French claims, but they have not yet returned to Paris.[79]
Clearly, not all
of the captured records in GA RF are of Russian émigré
provenance, such as, for example, the “trophy” papers of the Esterhazy family
that were reportedly seized in Hungary in 1945. The existence of a letter from
the nineteenth-century Russian Foreign Minister A. M. Gorchakov may have led to
the classification of the fond as containing “archival Rossica,” but the letter
involved was addressed to Esterhazy.
The Soviet report (noting seizure in Hungary) mentioned an important Metternich
autograph among the papers, but that is no longer listed in the current fond in
GA RF.[80]
Many earlier
historical “trophies” were delivered to the Central State Archive of Early Acts
(TsGADA SSSR, now RGADA), including the Hanseatic municipal archives from
Bremen, Hamburg, and Lübeck. Never open for public research in the USSR,
most of those archives were returned to Germany in a final restitution shipment
in 1990. Most of the early charters from those Hanseatic archives, however,
were first deposited in the Saltykov-Shchedrin State Public Library (GPB, now
RNB) in Leningrad, and later most of them were returned to East Germany. A few
damaged or still not fully described charters reportedly remain as trophy
“souvenirs” in the Manuscript Division of RNB (Russian National Library).
Indicative of tragic wartime and postwar dispersal, two trophy Bremen charters
have been identified in the Tikhomirov Collection in the Scientific Library of
the Academy of Sciences in Novosibirsk. Probably this latter dispersal results
from theft, such as one brought to trial in 1974 involving a former TsGADA
employee who managed to steal more than 200 early documents; many of them were
recovered by the archive, but others were subsequently sold in the USSR and
abroad. Prosecution was hindered by the secret “trophy” status of the
documents, which accordingly could not be publicly identified with the archive
(even in a Soviet court).[81]
The Central State
Historical Archive in Leningrad (TsGIAL, now RGIA), and the Central State
Military History Archive (TsGVIA, now RGVIA) also received their share of
historical trophies appropriate to their “profile.” Literary “trophies,”
including many papers of Russian émigré writers were acquired by
the Central State Archive of Literature and Art (TsGALI, now RGALI), while
other archival trophies went to many different libraries and museums.
Trophy
Musicalia. Musicalia
is an important example of the widely dispersed “trophy” archivalia brought to
the Soviet Union—as opposed to the records
brought home for operational utilization. Only in the last few years has it
been possible to start identifying the dispersed music scores that have long
remained hidden among the cultural loot. Soviet documents from the 1950s, first
published in 1996 in German translation, list some of the trophy musicalia
(including manuscript scores) that were distributed among eight different
institutions in Moscow and Leningrad. But in Moscow, the original documents are
now classified “secret” in former Communist Party archives.[82]
Recently, thanks
to another German-published document, the existence of one collection of trophy
music scores—predominantly of provenance in several different prewar German
libraries (including the City Library in Breslau [now Polish Wrocław])—has been revealed in the Glinka Central Museum of Musical
Culture. Long held in secret, a catalogue is now in preparation and an
exhibition is planned in the spring of 2002.[83] Among the collection are four autograph music
scores (including one by Stravinsky) dedicated to the Polish-born
émigré pianist Artur Rubinstein (who died an American citizen)
that were confiscated from Rubinstein’s apartment in Paris after he fled at the
beginning of the war. Those apparently came to Moscow from the “one crate of
the Rubinstein materials” that was found by a Soviet trophy brigade in the
basement of the bombed-out RSHA headquarters building in Berlin, but the fate
of the remainder of that crate (and the rest of the Rubinstein collection) has
not yet been determined.[84]
Some of the other
trophy musicalia in the former Soviet Union represents loot from German
collections that were evacuated from Berlin after the Western Allied bombing intensified
in 1943. It was largely thanks to other German-published Soviet documents (the
originals of which are still classified in Moscow) that, together with a
Harvard music professor and a Ukrainian archival colleague, we located in Kyiv
in the summer of 1999 the trophy German collection of over 5,100 predominantly
manuscript music scores from the Sing-Akademie in Berlin, including a major
part of the Bach family archive, then held in the Central State Archive-Museum
of Literature and Art of Ukraine (TsDAMLM Ukraïny).[85] The collection was found in 1945 by a
Ukrainian trophy brigade, presumably in the Silesian castle of Ullersdorf,
where 14 crates had been evacuated from Berlin in August 1943. Brought to Kyiv
in October 1945 a week after the rector of the Kyiv State Conservatory had been
ordered to Germany, it was deposited in the Conservatory and detailed
inventories prepared, but subsequently transferred to the newly established
TsDAMLM in 1973. Newly discovered documents rule out the possibility that the
archive went to Moscow and thence to Kyiv, as some Russian specialists still
want to insist. Those documents also show that specialists in Kyiv in the fall
of 1945 did recognize the true provenance of the collection.[86]
Ukraine has
recently been more inclined to return displaced cultural property to its
country of origin, including Germany than Russia. Restitution of the
Sing-Akademie manuscripts to Germany from Ukraine began with a symbolic
transfer of a Bach score in January 2001, followed in September 2001 by an
authorizing decree by the Ukrainian Council of Ministers. Since Ukraine has no
law permitting restitution, the collection had to be withdrawn from the
National Archival Fond of Ukraine and replaced by the microfilmed copies. The
transfer was to have taken place thereafter during Chancellor Schroeder’s visit
to Kyiv in September, but that visit was cancelled at the last minute. Instead,
Schroeder hosted President Putin in Dresden, where he witnessed the return of
the above-mentioned three paintings from the Dresden Gallery. Even without
Schroeder’s visit, following a public signing of a protocol of transfer on 29
November 2001, a Lufthansa cargo plane left Kyiv for Frankfurt with the
priceless Sing-Akademie collection which was deposited the next day in the
Musicalia Division of the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin.[87]
Even more
important today than the international “politics” of restitution for such a
veritable “trophy,” we now know that the priceless Berlin Sing-Akademie music
scores have survived their wartime odyssey and were in fact “twice (and today
even thrice) saved.” Now freed from the status of prisoners of war, an
international collaborative project brought funding for preservation
microfilming, and professional description is proceeding by a team of German,
American, and Ukrainian scholars. A cantata by Carl Philip Emanuel Bach from
the collection was performed in Symphony Hall in Boston at the end of March
2001. The “Hymn of Thanksgiving and Friendship” had not been heard in 225 years
since its initial premiere in 1785.[88] Another concert was performed in Kyiv in
November. Rare printed books and correspondence files from the Sing-Akademie
collection are still missing, but as yet no trace of them have been found
elsewhere in Russia or Ukraine. Eight volumes from the library were returned to
East Germany from the Moscow Conservatory in the late 1950s and are now held in
the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, but so far it has been impossible to determine
the facts of their migration.
Twice-Plundered Archives and the Nazi Agencies
of Their Plunder
Identification
of the provenance of archives and library collections seized and transferred to
the Soviet Union after World War II is also complicated by the fact that many
of them were earlier plundered by different agencies of the Nazi regime from
almost every country in Europe. Some come from Nazi victims in occupied
countries of Western Europe; others include files of “enemies of the regime” in
Germany and other Axis powers. Indeed, almost all of the non-German captured
foreign records in the former Special Archive, with the exception of those from
Poland and Romania, were first captured by Nazi agencies from declared
political and ideological “enemies”—twice plundered, or (as some prefer to call
them) “twice saved.” Thus it is important to identify major groups of archival
materials according to the specific Nazi agencies of their plunder. In many
cases, the operational records of those same Nazi agencies were brought to
Moscow together with their twice-captured loot. But the reconstruction of those
Nazi operations and transfers is exceedingly complicated, because both the
records and the loot were reprocessed once in Moscow and often dispersed among
many different archives and fonds. Analysis of these complexes, together with
the records of the Nazi agencies that captured them, is helping establish the
exact provenance and migratory paths of many captured records and provide clues
about contingent missing or dispersed segments. Unfortunately, however, the
Nazi agency records in Moscow and Kyiv are not well arranged and described, and
in many cases, they are fragmented among several countries and different
repositories. Some fonds were returned to East Germany earlier, and no
microfilms were retained, so now they must be matched up with contingent parts
in Germany or elsewhere.
Reichsarchiv.
The German Imperial State
Archives under the Ministry of the Interior was also involved in considerable
plunder. However, no examples of Western European materials plundered by the
Reichsarchiv have been found among the records of that agency that the Soviets
transferred to Moscow.
Heeresarchiv.
Under the Nazi regime, a
separate military archival authority, the Nazi Military Archives was
established in Potsdam in 1936 on the basis of the military division of the
Reichsarchiv. Archival plunder by the Heeresarchiv in occupied countries was
among the largest in volume of any agency of the Nazi regime. The special
military archival intelligence center for records from Western Europe (HA–Aktensammelstelle
West) established in 1941 in Berlin-Wannsee, housed huge quantities of records
from France, along with some from Belgium and the Netherlands, among other
countries. Heeresarchiv branches in Vienna, Prague, and Danzig-Oliva (now Polish Gdańsk-Oliwa)
specialized in acquisitions from Eastern Europe, including in the latter case
“some 400 tons of documentary materials from 27 cities in the Baltic and
northwest regions of the Russian Federation.”[89] Those plundered foreign military records were
likewise among the most voluminous archives shipped to Moscow immediately after
the war, for example, no less than thirty Soviet freight cars from
Berlin-Wannsee.[90] Cooperative efforts with archivists or
historians from several affected countries will be needed to reconstruct the
holdings in Berlin-Wannsee on the basis of the many German inventories of the
Heeresarchiv captured loot that have been preserved in Moscow.
Reichssicherheitshauptamt
(RSHA) Amt VII. The
dreaded RSHA, usually known in English as the Reich Security Main Office, embraced various secret police,
security, foreign intelligence, and counterintelligence functions within the
Nazi state, including the Gestapo and the SD (Sicherheitsdienst). The functions
of the Seventh Office, or Amt VII, of the RSHA, designated for “Ideological
Research and Evaluation” (Weltanschauliche Forschung und Auswertung), had
initially been part of Amt II for internal security and struggle against
“enemies of the Reich.” Little was earlier known about the massive and varied
complex of archival and library materials plundered from all over the Continent
Amt VII brought together, initially in Berlin, but then evacuated to Silesia in
the summer of 1943. These included plundered Masonic collections, Jewish
materials (from communities, organizations, and individuals), socialist files
(such as records of the Second International, collections from the Paris Branch
of IISH), records of churches and religious organizations, Russian
émigré groups and individuals, and many personal papers in all
categories. All of them should be considered property confiscated from “victims
of the Nazi regime,” and hence should be subject to restitution under the new
Russian law, even those from Germany and Austria.
The Rothschild
business and family records that have now been returned to the family were
among the massive loot held by the RSHA Amt VII in their special archival
hideaway in the Castle of Wölfelsdorf (now
Polish Wilkanów), south of Breslau (now Polish Wrocław), where they were discovered by a Soviet Trophy Brigade in
the summer of 1945.[91] Subsequently
at least 28 freight train wagons of those archival holdings were delivered to
Moscow by Soviet authorities under Beria’s orders in October and November.[92] It is of key importance for the fate of looted
collections that many operational records of the RSHA Amt VII and its
predecessors came with the confiscated archives; although some of these were
returned to East Germany and others dispersed to other Soviet repositories,
large quantities survive in RGVA.[93] In the early 1990s, another major group of
RSHA Amt VII records from Silesian operations surfaced in Warsaw, but those
have since been restituted to Germany.
RSHA
Amt IV—Abwehr.
The Fourth Office of the Reich Security Main Office, which also comprised the Gestapo, ran significant
counterintelligence operations (Abwehr) on the basis of massive captured French
records. A special unit, initially in Paris and then Berlin, was later
evacuated to the country village of Oberliebich (now Czech Horní Libchava, near Česká-Lípa) in
the Sudetenland. That was where they held the captured French intelligence
records which were subsequently captured by a Red Army SMERSH unit with the
First Ukrainian Front in May 1945, with approximately 300,000 files and over a
million card files of Deuxième Bureau and Sûreté Nationale
records, among others. A special Soviet archival crew was flown in under direct
personal orders from Beria to prepare their transport. Twenty-eight sealed
freight cars from Česká-Lípa
reached Moscow at the end of July. Most of the French intelligence and police
records have now been restituted to France.[94] But some original French files were
transferred to other Soviet agencies and abroad. For
example, some files regarding the Hungarian leadership were reportedly turned
over to Hungary.[95]
The
Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR). One of the most important Nazi cultural
looting agencies was the so-called Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, the
Special Command Force for Occupied Territories, headed by Hitler’s ideological
henchman Reichsleiter Alfred Rosenberg. In Western Europe the ERR is mainly
known for art looting,[96] but it was also responsible for the
confiscation of extensive library and archival materials. Many of its plundered
Jewish and Masonic collections come from France and the Low Countries,[97] and major shipments of Hebraica and Judaica
were looted from Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, and Lithuania. The ERR also
concentrated on anti-Bolshevik research by setting up a specialized library for
East European research known as the Ostbücherei.
In 1943, most of
the ERR anti-Bolshevik operations were
evacuated from Berlin to the quiet Silesian city of Ratibor (now Polish Racibórz), alongside
with their archival and library collections, including holdings from the
Petliura and Turgenev Libraries in Paris
and from other collections in France and Belgium.[98] With more shipments from Ukraine, Belarus, and
the Baltic countries, books and periodicals in the Ostbücherei expanded to
an estimated million and a half volumes by the end of 1944.
Archival materials
in Ratibor also included a major collection of revolutionary-period
documentation plundered from Kyiv and a freight-car load of the Communist Party
Archive from Dnipropetrovs'k.[99] The ERR prize loot was five freight-car loads
from the Communist Party Archive of Smolensk Oblast, almost all of which were
recovered by the Red Army and returned to Smolensk in 1945. Slightly over 500
files from the Smolensk archive that the ERR managed to evacuate to Germany
were later seized by a U.S. intelligence unit and are still in the National
Archives in Washington DC.[100]
Although they
evacuated some of their records from Ratibor, the ERR abandoned most of their
foreign archival and library loot, which fell to Soviet hands in 1945. Many
fragmentary archival materials of Western European provenance brought together
by the ERR were first transferred to Kyiv in December 1945, together with a
major group of ERR records; they were transferred to the Special Archive in
1956, and many of them turned out to be files from some of the same groups of
records brought back from the RSHA cache in Silesia. Further to the West in
Silesia the Red Army also seized the musicalia collections brought together by
the ERR Special Music Staff, the Sonderstab Musik, but the fate of the seven
freight train loads reportedly removed from the ERR castle in Langenau (now Polish Czernica, west of Wrocław) remains unresolved.
Soviet authorities
also captured many records of ERR operations, which are now scattered in
Moscow, Vilnius, and especially Kyiv. A current project with a library
microform publisher (also involving the Bundesarchiv and the Holocaust Museum)
seeks to bring together all of the ERR records dispersed in many countries,
including Germany, France, and the United States, and provide a virtual finding
aid.[101]
Russia and “the
West”—Cultural Trophies and Restitution in Post-1991 Russia
Difficult as it is for foreigners to
understand, many Russians today have a very different attitude towards
displaced cultural treasures than is the case in Western Europe and the United
States. Perhaps it is part of the legacy of the Cold War and the Stalinist
regime that created it. Today the vast majority of Russians (with Russian Duma
estimates as high as 86 percent) are unwilling to consider restitution of
cultural property (including archives) to Germany and its wartime allies. Only
reluctantly are many Russians prepared to proceed with limited restitution of
Nazi-confiscated cultural treasures from Western European countries, and
perhaps, since Russian adherence to the principles of the Washington DC
Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets and the carrot-stick of Western funding,
they might consider restitution to Holocaust victims. But the prohibition on
restitution to Germany and other Axis powers remains strong:
First,
because Russians consider cultural treasures seized from those countries as
“compensatory restitution” for the cultural treasures lost, destroyed, or
plundered from the USSR by the Nazi invaders and their allies. Nikolai Gubenko,
the key spokesman for the new Russian law, who led the four-year fight for its
enactment through the Russian parliament, in a defensive presentation to the
Washington Conference, stressed that in Russia “86 percent supported the Law.”
He and other legislators believe, as he phrases it, “Russia has a normal right
to compensation,” particularly “because the Soviet Union suffered the most” in
the war which “was genocide against the Slavic, as well as Jewish races.”[102] Similarly in December 1945, Agitprop head
Georgii Aleksandrov used less emotive words, but stressed the same intention to
Georgii Malenkov in December 1945 as he justified major shipments of selected
German cultural property found in the salt mines of Saxony: “[B]ringing them to
the USSR might to some extent serve as compensation for the losses wrought by
the German occupiers on scholarly and cultural institutions in the Soviet
Union.”[103]
Second, because
Russians firmly believe that Nazi-looted Russian cultural treasures were not
returned from the West. Hence, the argument still runs, Russia should not be
obliged to return those that were seized by Soviet authorities after the war in
compensation, or as “restitution in kind” for the Soviet treasures lost and
destroyed.
Few Russians are aware that between fall 1945 and 1952, the
United States returned to the Soviet Union from Germany over half a million
Soviet cultural treasures that had been plundered by the Nazis. German
specialists prepared a database of the individual cultural property that made
up the shipments.[104] A facsimile edition of the official transfer
documents and inventories of restituted cultural treasures was released in a
CD-ROM edition by the National Archives of the United States in December 2001.
Information about the significant postwar Western Allied cultural restitution
was never made public in the USSR, and even today Russian archivists cannot
find the Soviet copies of those U.S. transfer documents.[105] Hence deputies in the Russian Parliament kept
repeating Nikolai Gubenko’s refrain in July 1996: “Now we are asked to return .
. . what we received from the aggressor. We ourselves, we received nothing that
had been taken away.”[106] Gubenko later argued, “‘Russia Had Been Robbed
Twice’—first by Fascist Germany and then by its Allies. . . . Most of the
displaced cultural treasures found at the end of the war in Germany, including
the Russian ones, were transported across the ocean.”[107] The published documents from the U.S. National
Archives tell a different story.
Third, because with
the transfer of the mosaics and commode from the Amber Chamber as part of the
spring 2000 exchange, and then the icon from Pskov, Russians are convinced that
the Germans are still hiding many other cultural treasures from the USSR.
Fourth,
because deputies in the Russian Duma argued about the new Russian law: “the
language of this Law is the language of justice.” The rule of law, and respect
for international agreements is still not established in Russia. A different
concept of international law and justice appears to permeate Russian lawmakers,
government officials, and even some intellectuals. If queried about the Hague
Convention of 1907 that prohibits the seizure of cultural treasures in time of
war, they would repeat that the “trophies” brought to Moscow were compensatory
restitution after the war was over. The Allied Control Council in Germany never
agreed to a principle of “restitution in kind,” or “compensatory restitution,”
but Soviet authorities followed their own principles, which they now consider
have the strength of law. No peace treaty was ever signed with Germany, and the
Treaty of Friendship the Soviet Union signed with a reunified Germany in 1990,
providing for the mutual restitution of cultural property, was soon forgotten
in the “new” Russian Federation.
Even in 1946,
Soviet representatives in Germany quite openly admitted the extent of their
seizures and, cynically describing German cultural valuables as “war trophies,”
refused to submit a list of those they had taken to the USSR. (American
authorities had such lists, but chose never to make them public.)[108] In his Washington DC presentation in December
1998, Duma cultural leader Gubenko stressed an international legal basis under
which “the Soviet Union had the right to confiscate and own the cultural
treasures of former hostile states.” He quoted an Allied Control Council
resolution that “The right for restitution is granted only to the states, which
were completely or partially occupied.”[109] With respect to archives, Russian legislators
accordingly are obviously not prepared to adopt the 1976 UNESCO position
(reinforcing the Hague Conventions of 1907 and 1954) that “Military and
colonial occupation do not confer any special right to retain archives acquired
by virtue of that occupation.”[110]
Fifth,
because Russian politicians, and even many of those in Rosarkhiv making
archival restitution decisions, do not seem to realize that—aside from Nazi
agency records—most of the German and Austrian records still held in Moscow—and
especially those from the former Special Archive—were actually confiscated by
Nazi security agencies from declared “enemies” of the Nazi regime in those
countries and those who were victimized by the Nazis. In many cases they
represent files from Jewish communities that did not survive the Holocaust,
Masonic lodges that were suppressed and whose members were also sent off to
prison, and various repressed Christian religious groups, among others.
Sixth,
because they do not recognize the importance of reintegrating the Nazi agency
files remaining in Moscow with those that the United States and Great Britain
turned over to Germany already in the 1960s. Indeed, a major problem for World
War II scholarship is the dispersal of Nazi records. Many of the Nazi agency
records in Moscow are actually contingent fragments of record groups already
professionally processed in Germany. The reintegration of Nazi records from
East and West Germany following reunification reinforces that situation.
Tracing wartime cultural losses and displacements, to say nothing of human
losses, would be much easier if those records could be reunited with their
missing fragments.
Seventh,
because unlike their Western European counterparts and archivists throughout
the world, Russians do not agree that archives should be considered differently
than art, and that as unalienable official records, they should not be treated
as “trophies” or considered objects for exchange. The Russian delegation to the
Conference of the International Round Table on Archives (CITRA) in Thessalonica
in 1994 were among the three to abstain from the resolution to that effect. As
archivists, they may understand that archives should go home from the wars, but
as official Russian government representatives, they could not raise their hand
to vote against government policy and widespread Russian public support for the
policy of non-restitution.[111]
Eighth
and finally, on a deeper emotive, socio-psychological level, because the
Russian public, turning inward since the collapse of the Soviet empire, views
those trophies (even if they have never seen them) as symbols of the Soviet
victory over the “fascist” invader, which the USSR and their own families
sacrificed so much to achieve. The cult of Stalin, in film, song, and public
statuary reinforced the cult of Stalin’s and the people’s victory in the Great
Patriotic War, as the reality of the “meeting on the Elbe” was transformed in
Cold War propaganda.[112] Other countries who fought the “fascist”
invader and achieved victory in the Second World War have been more prepared to
return the displaced cultural property and the archives of other nations and
people who were victimized by the Nazi regime (including those in Germany),
along with those of Germany itself. But for Russians, the reality of other
nations’ memory embodied in those “trophies” has been transformed into emotive
symbols. Thus the rare book specialist Aleksandr Sevostianov bitterly denounced
the “anti-patriotic and liberal currents of the 1991–1993 period,” which were
favoring restitution of the “Spoils of War,” which, in his view, for Russia
were much “more than trophies.”[113] The Soviet people’s suffering and victory in
the Great Patriotic War has indeed been transformed in postwar decades into an
integral component of Soviet popular ideology. In the process, the long-hidden
foreign cultural treasures and archives that were transferred to the USSR have
taken on a more abstract and transcendent meaning—as symbols of victory in that
“war in myth and memory.”[114]
Conclusions
Professional
archivists with international support and resolutions from the Council of
Europe, the ICA, and Unesco would argue that displaced archives need to be
handled differently than art or library books. Indeed, the international legal
basis and precedents for unilateral archival restitution of displaced official
records of state and private agencies and individuals are even stronger than is
the case for art. Besides, who in Russia would ever study files of Dutch
feminist organizations or Belgian theosophic societies, and how could they
possibly “compensate” for Russian records lost or destroyed during the war?
We need still more
coordinated, cooperative research by specialists from many countries in the wide
range of sources that are available. And we can still hope that Russian
archives will be more forthcoming with the hitherto secret data about
accessions and transfers of the many still displaced cultural treasures held in
Russia from all over the European Continent. Until we can identify the
provenance and migratory routes of the displaced foreign archival materials
still in Moscow, it will be difficult to process restitution claims and
identify dispersed contingent fragments. Too many displaced archives and
library collections are still lost or held as prisoners of war in Eastern
Europe. At the same time, the archival records of Nazi agencies that could
provide the clues to their displacements remain fragmented and displaced, while
many of them have yet to be adequately identified and described.
At the time CITRA
was gathered in Thessalonica in 1994, few (if any) participants realized that a
major group of Nazi-confiscated records from the Thessalonica Sephardic Jewish
Community was held in Moscow. They had been found in Silesia by Red Army scouts
with the RSHA cache after the war in the castle of Wölfelsdorf, along with
some files from the Jewish Community of Athens, and a few other scattered
groups of Jewish records of provenance in Greece. As of the end of 2001 they
were still in Moscow, among over 600 foreign fonds in the former Special
Archive.[115] They have already been microfilmed by Israeli
specialists, who paid a high fee for the right to copy them. Copies were
furnished to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), also at a
high cost. Today Greece is claiming the originals, but now Rosarkhiv is asking
Greece to pay again. Restitution issues for Jewish cultural property are often
complicated in cases where the communities that created the records have been
annihilated (as it happened to 90 percent of the Jewish community in
Thessalonica) or their surviving files have since been dispersed. In the case
of Thessalonica, some of the community records are now also held by the YIVO
Institute for Jewish Research in New York City and a couple of files have
surfaced in Amsterdam.[116] Today Jewish survivors in Greece and even in
Thessalonica itself are prepared to assure the preservation of those records
and would like to see them returned to the country where they were created. The
CITRA meeting in Thessalonica coincided with the opening of a new provincial
archive building. Those files created in a language few in Moscow can read may
have been “twice saved” and even “rescued” by the Red Army, but they can hardly
help Russians today celebrate their victory over fascism or “compensate” for
Russian files lost or destroyed. Those files today could serve as a memorial to
those who perished during World War II or were forced to flee their homeland,
as well as a record of the community that produced them. We have seen some recent Russian “gestures of goodwill” with
respect to trophy art returned to Germany, but these archival survivors of the
Holocaust, together with many others confiscated from victims of the Nazi
regime, still remain prisoners of World War II in Moscow, prisoners not only of
the war itself, but also the “war in myth and memory.”
Abbreviations
and Acronyms
AMSAB Amsab Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis/Amsab Institute d’Histoire Sociale (Amsab [Archives and Museum of the Socialist Labour Movement] Institute of Social History), Ghent
AVP RF Arkhiv
vneshnei politiki Rossiiskoi
Federatsii (Archive of Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation), Moscow, under
the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
AVPRI Arkhiv
vneshnei politiki Rossiiskoi Imperii
(Archive of Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire), Moscow, under the Ministry
of Foreign Affairs
BAB Bundesarchiv
(Federal Archives), Berlin-Lichterfelde
BAN Biblioteka Rossiiskoi
Akademii nauk (Library of the Academy of Sciences), St. Petersburg
CITRA Conference
internationale de la Table Ronde des Archives (International Conference of the
Round Table on Archives), under ICA/CIA
ERR Einsatzstab
Reichsleiter Rosenberg (Rosenberg Special Command Force for Occupied
Territories)
FSB Federal'naia
sluzhba bezopasnosti Rossiiskoi Federatsii (Federal
Security Service of the Russian Federation), formerly KGB
GA RF Gosudarstvennyi
arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (State Archive of the Russian Federation), Moscow, formerly TsGAOR SSSR and TsGA RSFSR
GAU Glavnoe arkhivnoe
upravlenie (Main Archival Administration), alternatively,
Glavarkhiv
—pri NKVD
(after 1946, MVD) SSSR (under the People’s Commissariat [after 1956, Ministry]
of Internal Affairs of the USSR), 1941–1960
—pri Sovete
Ministrov SSSR (under the Council of Ministers of the USSR), 1960–1991, often Glavarkhiv
GBL Gosudarstvennaia
biblioteka SSSR imeni V. I. Lenina (Lenin State Library), Moscow, since 1992, RGB
Glavarkhiv Glavnoe arkhivnoe upravlenie
(Main Archival Administration), alternatively,
and earlier often, GAU
GPB Gosudarstvennaia
Publichnaia biblioteka imeni M.E. Saltykova-Shchedrina (Saltykov-Shchedrin
State Public Library), Leningrad, since
1992, RNB, St. Petersburg
GPIB Gosudarstvennaia
publichnaia istoricheskaia biblioteka Rossii (State Public Historical Library of
Russia), Moscow
GPOB Gosudarstvennaia
politichesko-obshchestvenaia biblioteka (State Socio-Political Library, Moscow, before 1992, Library of the IML
ICA/CIA International Council on
Archives/Conseil International des Archives
IISH/IISG International Institute of
Social History/Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis, Amsterdam
IML Institut Marksizma-Leninizma pri TsK KPSS (Institute of
Marxism-Leninism under the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union), Moscow
MGB Ministerstvo
gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti (Ministry
of State Security of the USSR), after
1954, KGB
MVD Ministerstvo
vnutrennykh del (Ministry of Internal Affairs), before 1946, NKVD
NKVD Narodnyi komissariat
vnutrennykh del (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs), after 1946, MVD
RGADA Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi
arkhiv drevnikh aktov (Russian State Archive of Early Acts), Moscow, formerly TsGADA SSSR
RGALI Rossiiskii
gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva (Russian State Archive of
Literature and Art), Moscow, earlier TsGALI
SSSR
RGANI Rossiiskii
gosudarstvennyi arkhiv noveishei istorii (Russian State Archive of Contemporary
History), Moscow, earlier TsKhSD
RGASPI Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi
arkhiv sotsial'no-politicheskoi istorii (Russian State Archive of
Socio-Political History), Moscow, before
March 1999, RTsKhIDNI
RGB Rossiiskaia gosudarstvennaia
biblioteka (Russian State Library), Moscow, before
1992, GBL
RGIA Rossiiskii
gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (Russian State Historical Archive),
St. Petersburg, earlier TsGIA
SSSR and TsGIAL
RGVA Rossiiskii
gosudarstvennyi voennyi arkhiv (Russian State Military Archive), Moscow, since March 1999 includes the holdings of former TsKhIDK (TsGOA
SSSR)
RGVIA Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi
voenno-istoricheskii arkhiv (Russian State Military History Archive), Moscow,
earlier TsGVIA SSSR
RNB Rossiiskaia
natsional'naia biblioteka (Russian National Library), St. Petersburg, before 1992, GPB, Leningrad
Rosarkhiv Federal'naia arkhivnaia sluzhba Rossiiskoi Federatsii (Federal
Archival Service), Moscow, before 1992, Glavarkhiv
RSFSR Rossiiskaia
Sovietskaia Federativnaia Sotsialisticheskaia Respublika (Russian Soviet
Federated Socialist Republics)
RSHA Reichssicherheitshauptamt
(Reich Security Main Office)
RTsKhIDNI Rossiiskii
tsentr khraneniia i izucheniia dokumentov noveishei istorii (Russian Center for the
Preservation and Study of Documents of Modern History), Moscow, formerly TsPA, now RGASPI
RZIA Russkii
zagranichnyi istoricheskii arkhiv
(Russian Foreign Historical
Archive), formerly Prague, transferred to Moscow in 1945/46
SMERSH “Smert' shpionam”
(literally, “Death to spies”—military counter-espionage units under the Chief
Intelligence Directorate—GRU [Glavnoe razvedyvatel'noe upravlenie])
SVAG Sovetskaia voennaia
administratsiia v Germanii (Soviet Military Administration in Germany)
SVR Sluzhba vneshnei
razvedtki RF (Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation), formerly KGB, First Chief Directorate
TsAMO Tsentral'nyi arkhiv
Ministerstva oborony RF (Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the
Russian Federation), Podol'sk
TsDAMLM Tsentral'nyi derzhavnyi
arkhiv-muzei literatury i mystetsva Ukraïny (Central State Archive-Museum
of Literature and Art of Ukraine, [formerly
of the Ukrainian SSR]), Kyiv
TsDAVO Tsentral'nyi derzhavnyi
arkhiv vyshchykh orhaniv derzhavnoi vlady ta upravlinnia Ukraïna (Central
State Archive of the Highest Agencies of State Power and Administration of
Ukraine), formerly TsDAZhR URSR
(Russian TsGAOR UkrSSR), Kyiv
TsGADA SSSR Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv
drevnikh aktov (Central State Archive of Early Acts), Moscow, now RGADA
TsGALI SSSR Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv
literatury i iskusstva SSSR (Central State Archive of Literature and Art of the
USSR), Moscow, now RGALI
TsGAOR SSSR Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv
Oktiabr'skoi Revoliutsii SSSR (Central State Archive of the October Revolution
of the USSR)—SSSR, Moscow (now part of
GA RF)
—TsGAOR UkrSSR,
Kyiv, now TsDAVO
TsGIAL Tsentral'nyi
gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv v Leningrade (Central State Historical
Archive in Leningrad), now RGIA
TsGIAM Tsentral'nyi
gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv Moskvy (Central State Historical Archive
in Moscow), Moscow, later part of TsGAOR
SSSR, now part of GA RF
TsGOA SSSR Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi osobyi
arkhiv SSSR (Central State Special Archive of the USSR), Moscow, now part of RGVA, earlier (1992–1999) TsKhIDK)
TsGVIA SSSR Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi
voenno-istoricheskii arkhiv SSSR (Central
State Military History Archive of the USSR), Moscow, now RGVIA
TsKhIDK Tsentr khraneniia
istoriko-dokumental'nykh kollektsii (Center for the Preservation of Historico-Documentary
Collections), Moscow, formerly TsGOA
SSSR, now part of RGVA
TsKhSD Tsentr khraneniia
sovremennoi documentatsii (Center for the Preservation of Contemporary
Documentation), Moscow, now RGANI
TsPA Tsentral'nyi
partiinyi arkhiv Instituta Marksizma-Leninizma TsK KPSS (Central Party Archive
of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism under the Central Committee of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union), Moscow, now RGASPI, earlier
(1992–1999), RTsKhIDNI
US NA U.S. National Archives,
Washington, DC, and College Park, MD
USHMM United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum, Washington, DC
VGBIL Vserossiiskaia
gosudarstvennaia biblioteka inostrannoi literatury imeni M. I. Rudomino
(All-Russian State Library for Foreign Literature [founder M. I.
Rudomino]), Moscow
YIVO YIVO
[Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut (Jewish Scientific Research Institute)]
Jewish Research Institute, Vilnius, New York City, NY
N.B. For transcription of Cyrillic
references, the Library of Congress system of transliteration is used
throughout, modified with the omission of ligatures, except when an alternate
form appears in a documentary title or text.
A few personal
and geographic names such as Yeltsin and Moscow have been retained in the form
most generally known in the West, but most others have been rendered in a more
strict LC transliterated form. Kyiv, Lviv, and other Ukrainian place names are
rendered in their Ukrainian, as now officially used since independence, instead
of the more familiar Russified forms (Kiev or Lvov). For historical references
to localities then officially part of the Reich during the war, such as Silesia
and the Sudetenland, official (and usually more familiar) German forms are used
with the present Polish or Czech versions in parentheses on first
reference—Ratibor (now Polish
Racibórz), Danzig (now Polish Gdańsk) etc., unless there is a
common accepted English variant, such as Silesia.
The
archival term “fond” has been retained, because it is commonly used
internationally (although often only in the plural form) and there is no exact
English translation of it. The term came to the Soviet Union from the French fonds, but not without some change of
usage. In Russian a “fond” is an integral group of records or a collection from
a single office or source. American archivists might prefer the more technical
term “record group,” which in British usage would normally be “archive group,”
but the Russian usage of the term is much more extensive, as a “fond” can
designate personal papers and/or collections as well as groups of institutional
records.
For
archival citations from Russian and Ukrainian archives, following the acronym of
the holding archive, references are given sequentially to the number of the
fond (record group or collection)/ opis’
(Ukrainian opys—inventory and/or
series within a fond)/ and the file unit (edinitsa
khraneniia or delo (Ukrainian sprava), followed by the folio (fol.[s])
numbers.
[1] An earlier version of this essay was
presented as a lecture at the Central European University in Budapest, 19 July
2001. It updates my report, “Twice Plundered or Twice Saved? Identifying
Russia’s “Trophy” Archives and the Nazi Agencies of Their Plunder,” which appears in Russian and in
English with the proceedings of the conference “Mapping Europe: Fate of Looted
Cultural Valuables in the Third Millennium,” Moscow, 10–11 April 2000, at the
website of the All-Russian State Library for Foreign Literature (VGBIL)— http://www.libfl.ru/restitution/conf/grimsted1_r.html;
a printed edition is in preparation. Some of the data are drawn from my book, Trophies of War and Empire: The Archival
Heritage of Ukraine, World War II, and the International Politics of
Restitution (Cambridge, MA: distributed by Harvard University Press for the
Ukrainian Research Institute, 2001). See also Grimsted, “Twice Plundered or
Twice Saved?: Russia’s ‘Trophy’ Archives and the Loot of the
Reichssicherheitshauptamt,” Holocaust and
Genocide Studies 15(2) (Fall 2001): 191–244; and my earlier articles,
“‘Trophy’ Archives and Non-Restitution: Russia’s Cultural ‘Cold War’ with the
European Community,” Problems of Post-Communism
45(3) (May/June 1998): 3–16; and “Displaced Archives and Restitution Problems
on the Eastern Front in the Aftermath of the Second World War,” Contemporary European History 6(1) 1997:
27–74. A full bibliography of my publications regarding displaced cultural
treasures (some with hot-links to the full texts) is now available on the
website of my Amsterdam institute: http://www.iisg.nl/archives_from_russia/.
The present text has been updated to the extent possible as
of the end of February 2002. Just as the OSA Budapest editors were checking the
final version, Karina Dmitreva (VGBIL) kindly sent me an advance copy of a
report by A. V. Kibovskii from the Ministry of Culture on Russian restitution
developments during 2001, scheduled for publication (in English and Russian) in
the Spoils of War: International
Newsletter, no. 8. That report made it possible to verify many of the
details in the early sections of this article.
[2] Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly, Opinion No. 193 (1996)—“On Russia’s request for membership of the Council of Europe,” adopted by the Assembly on 25 January 1996 when Russia was admitted to membership on its basis. Another paragraph in the admission document signed by Russia committed it “xi. to negotiate claims for the return of cultural property to other European countries on an ad hoc basis that differentiates between types of property (archives, works of art, buildings etc.) and of ownership (public, private or institutional).”
[3] Among the many bibliographies covering displaced cultural treasures in Russia, see “Beutekunst”: Bibliographie des internationalen Schrifttums über das Schicksal des im Zweiten Weltkrieg von der Roten Armee in Deutschland erbeuteten Kulturgutes (Museums-, Archiv- und Bibliotheksbestände) 1990-2000, compiled by Peter Bruhn, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin–Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Osteuropa-Abteilung, 2000 [Veröffentlichungen der Osteuropa-Abteilung. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin - Preußischer Kulturbesitz, 26; Literaturnachweise zu aktuellen Rußland-Themen, vol. 1]). See also the selected bibliography by Adalbert Goertz, “Looting Mother Rossija” at http://www.oldcolo.com/~goertz/beu.html, and additional listings on the NARA website: http://www.nara.gov/research/assets/bib/lootart.html; those websites provide further links.
[4] Revelations about the trophy art first
appeared in a series of articles by Konstantin Akinsha and Grigorii Kozlov in ARTnews in 1991. See the later book by
the same authors (with Sylvia Hochfield), Beautiful
Loot: The Soviet Plunder of Europe’s Art Treasures (New York: Random House,
1995), which unfortunately still has not appeared in Russian. The major museum
shipments to Russia are listed by Waldemar Ritter, “The Soviet Spoils
Commissions: On the Removal of Works of Art from German Museums and
Collections,” International Journal of
Cultural Property 7 (1998): 446–55. See also the revelations of Pavel
Knyshevskii with published texts of many still-classified documents in Dobycha: Tainy germanskikh reparatsii (Moscow:
Soratnik, 1994; also available in a German edition), and the review by Mark
Deich, “Dobycha—V adres Komiteta po delam iskusstv postupilo iz pobezhdennoi
Germanii svyshe 1 milliona 208 tysiach muzeinykh tsennostei,” Moskovskie novosti, no. 50 (23–30
October 1994): 18.
[5] See the impressive published volume from that conference, The Spoils of War: World War II and Its Aftermath: The Loss, Reappearance, and Recovery of Cultural Property, ed. Elizabeth Simpson (New York: Henry N. Abrams, 1997).
[6] Washington Conference on Holocaust Era Assets November 30–December 3, 1998: Proceedings, ed. J. D. Bindenagel et al. (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1999) [=Department of State publication 10603]; available electronically—http://www.state.gov/regions/eur/holocaust/heac.html. See especially the “Principles” (pp. 971–72) and the concluding remarks of U.S. Under Secretary of State Stuart E. Eizenstat, pp. 125–32.
[7] The program and proceedings of the Vilnius Forum, including my own presentation, are available at http://www.vilniusforum.lt/proceedings. See also the report by Martin Bailey in The Art Newspaper, 3 November 2000, also available on the Internet.
[8] See the description of the non-profit project, sponsored by Ronald S. Lauder and Edgar M. Brofman, with text of the agreement signed by Lauder in Moscow (4 December 2001) at the website of the Commission for Art Recovery in New York—http://www.comartrecovery.org, under “accomplishments–Russia.”
[9] See Sylvia Hochfield, “A German-Russian Breakthrough: Negotiators Agree to an Unprecedented Exchange of War Loot,” ARTnews 99 (3 March 1999): 68–70. “Panel from Amber Room Exchange with Bremen Drawings,” The Art Newspaper 11(101) (March 2000): 6. Celestine Bohlen, “Arts Abroad: A Homecoming for Treasures Looted in War,” New York Times, 27 April 2000. Recovery of the drawings in provincial Russia and their delivery to the German Embassy is described by Akinsha and Kozlov’s chapter “The Bremen Drawings,” in Beautiful Loot, pp. 243–50.
[10] Regarding Baldin’s rescue and the fate of the drawings in the USSR, see Akinsha and Kozlov’s chapter “The Bremen Drawings,” in Beautiful Loot, pp. 243–47. Viktor Baldin and the Bremen drawings was one of the featured segments in a two-hour 1995 Russian television film, “Po pravu pobeditelei” (By the Right of the Victors).
[11] Regarding the U.S. Customs seizure in New York, see Ralph Blumenthal, “Twice Stolen, Twice Found: A Case of Art on the Lam,” New York Times, 19 July 2001 (electronic version from NYTimes.com). Officials in the Russian Ministry of Culture told me about the Bremen drawings in Ukraine. Regarding the 1995 transfer, see Jamey Gambrell, “First Return of War Booty,” Art in America, no. 6, June 1995, p. 31; the 1998 return is noted by Doris Lemmermeier in Spoils of War: International Newsletter, no. 5, June 1998, p. 57. Regarding other transfers and the international context of restitution, see Grimsted, Trophies of War and Empire, chapter 12.
[12] See, for example, the article by John Varoli, “Restoring a Window’s Glow, Healing a War’s Wounds,” New York Times, 27 December 2000. See also Sof'ia Andreeva and Igor' Grebel'nikov, “111 oskolkov germanskoi istorii,” Kommersant', 30 August 2001, p. 10, after the exchange had been approved, and an earlier article in the issue for 6 June. See also Pavel Simonov, “Germaniia poluchit vitrazhi i pomozhet otstoit' khram,” Izvestiia, 21 February 2001, p. 8.
[13] Among other accounts, see the article by Serhii Kot, “Povernennia mykhailivskikh fresok: kul'turno-istorychnyi barter?” Polityka i kul’tura, no. 7 (90) (27 February–5 March 2001): 40–41; and Elena Gerusova, “Freski poekhali,” Kommersant', 2 February 2001, p. 13; and Liliia Didenko, Kirill Razumovskii, and Grigorii Revzin, “Freski sdali, freski priniali,” Kommersant', 7 February 2001, p. 14.
[14] Regarding the Dresden paintings, see Kira Dolinina, “Trofei s izmailovskoi barakholki privez Vladimir Putin v Drezdenskuiu galereiu,” Kommersant', 28 September 2001, p. 13; and “Germanii podarili kartinu s izmailovskoi barakholki,” Kommersant', 12 April 2001, p. 13. See also the press release from the Russian Information Agency “Novosti,” at the website http://Lenta.ru. Among other major projects, Timerbulatov’s company is under longterm contract for the construction of the new inner ring highway (“Novoe kol'tso Moskvy”) and several luxury housing complexes. A colored photograph of Timerbulatov making the April presentation with President Putin and German Chancellor Schroeder is found at the “Konti” website http://Konti.ru. Harrod Marx, Director of the Staatliche Kunstsammulung Dresden, who was personally involved in the September transfer, confirmed the details to me.
[15] Among other Russian press commentaries, see Iulia Kantor, “Iantarnaia politika,” Izvestiia, 23 July 2001, p. 8; and Andrei Riskin, “Pskovu vernuli ikonu Bozhiei materi,” Nezavisimaia gazeta, 7 September 2001, p. 7.
[16] See Evgenii Kuz'min, “Taina tserkvi v Uzkom,” Literaturnaia gazeta 38 (8 September 1990): 10. Kuz'min now heads the Library Division of the Ministry of Culture.
[17] See Grimsted, Trophies of War and Empire, especially chapter 7, pp. 257–70, with citations to relevant literature. See the revealing article by Evgenii Kuz'min, “Neizvestnye stranitsy istorii nemetskikh bibliotechnykh kollektsii v gody Vtoroi mirovoi voiny,” in Restitutsiia bibliotechnykh sobranii i sotrudnichestvo v Evrope: Rossiisko-germanskii “kruglyi stol,” 11–12 dekabria 1992 g. (Moscow, 1994; also published in German), and the article by Ingo Kolasa, “Sag mir wo die Bücher sind. . . : Ein Beitrag zu ‘Beutekulturgüten’ und ‘Trophäenkommissionen’,” Zeitschrift für Bibliothekswesen und Bibliographie 42(4) (1995): 357–60. The Kuz'min article and a few other selections from the 1992 Roundtable are available electronically—http://www.libfl.ru/restitution, together with extensive bibliography.
[18] Ingo Kolasa and Klaus-Dieter Lehmann, eds., Die Trophäenkommissionen der Roten Armee: Eine Dokumentensammlung zur Verschleppung von Büchern aus deutschen Bibliotheken (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1996 [=Zeitschrift für Bibliothekswesen und Bibliographie, Sonderheft 64]). Although some of the original Soviet documents are partially declassified in GA RF, those among former Communist Party records in RGASPI and RGANI remain classified.
[19] Adrian Rudomino, “Polveka v plenu,” Nashe nasledie 32 (1994): 92–96 (also available electronically: http://www.libfl.ru/restitution/rudomino/index.html); and Oleg Borodin and Tat'iana Dolgodrova, “Kollektsiia Nemetskogo muzeia knigu i shrifta v sobranii Rossiiskoi gosudarstvennoi biblioteki,” ibid., 97–106. Dolgodrova’s doctoral dissertation (Moscow State University, 2000) features a detailed analysis of the Gutenberg Bible fragment in RGB. The transport of the Gutenberg Bible was among the examples featured in a two-hour 1995 Russian television film, “Po pravu pobeditelei” (By the Right of the Victors).
[20] Liudmilla Koval', “i u knig svoia sud'ba—v Rossiiskoi gosudarstvennoi biblioteke,” Biblioteka, 2000, no. 7, pp. 86–88. Koval' currently directs a museum on the history of RGB. See also the report on trophy books by RGB Deputy Director Nina I. Khakhaleva, at the VGBIL April 2000 conference website (in English and Russian), http://www.libfl.ru/restitution/conf/hahaleva_e.html; (Russian: … hahaleva_r.html).
[21] Katalog der Drucke des XVI.Jahrhunderts aus den Beständen des VGBIL/Katalog nemetskoiazychnykh izdanii XVI veka v fondakh VGBIL/Catalogus librorum sedecimi saeculi qui in Totius Rossiae reipublicae litterarm externaram biblioteca asserrantur, comp. I. A. Korkmazova and A. L. Ponomarev; ed. N. V. Kotrelev (Moscow: “Rudomino,” 1992; 2nd ed. 1996), and the more recent Katalog izdanii XVI veka v fondakh VGBIL/Catalogus librorum sedecimi saeculi qui in totius Rossiae Reipublicae litterarm externaram biblioteca asserrantur, part 2: Knigi na novykh evropeiskikh iazykakh (krome nemetskogo)/Libri verba aliarum linguarum vernacularum continentes (Moscow: “Rudomino,” 2001). The database of book markings is available electronically—http://www.libfl.ru/restitution, and has also been issued in printed form (Moscow: “Rudomino,” 2000).
[22] Trofeinye knigi iz biblioteki Sharoshpatakskogo reformatskogo kolledzha (Vengriia) v fondakh Nizhegorodskoi gosudarstvennoi oblastnoi universal'noi nauchnoi biblioteki: Katalog/Displaced Books from Sárospatak Calvinist College Library (Hungary) in the Collections of Nizhny Novgorod Regional Research Library: Catalogue, comp. E. V. Zhuravleva, N. N. Zubrov, and E. A. Korkmazova (Moscow: “Rudomino,” 1997).
[23] See the program and reports: http://www.libfl.ru/restitution/conf01/index.html, including my own brief contribution, “Gestures of Goodwill and the Unfinished Business of Post-World War II Restitution,” available in English and Russian translation. The conference texts are published as “Zhesty dobroi voli i zakonodatel'stvo”/“Gesten des guten Willens und Gesetzgebung,” ed. E. Iu. Genieva, Klaus Michaletz, and Olaf Werner (Berlin: Verlag Arno Spitz; Moscow: Rudomino, 2001), including my article in Russian—“Zhesty dobroi voli i nezakonchennoe delo poslevoennoi restitutsii,” pp. 126–31; and in German “Die Gesten des guten Willens und die unbeendete Sache der Nachkriegsrestitution,” pp. 132–37. Regarding Russian–Hungarian restitution issues, see, for example, Ivan Dolgoverov, “Eshche odni pretendenty na restitutsiiu: Vopros vozvrashcheniia kul'turnykh tsennostei meshaet rossiisko-vengerskim otnosheniiam,” Nezavisimaia gazeta, 14 February 2001, p. 6. Regarding the German attitudes, see for example, the negative report by Roland Eggleston, “Russia: Germany Sees Only Slow Progress in Regaining Art Treasures,” in RFE/RL Newsline, 22 May 2001, at http://www.rfer.org/nca/features2001/05/21052001122244.asp, which parallels accounts in German papers and reports from colleagues who took part.
[24] See the program and reports: http://www.libfl.ru/restitution/conf/index.html.
[25] In July and August 2001, RGB colleagues reported to me the figure of 4,300 volumes and stressed that they are actively trying to identify their trophy holdings, which have been dispersed throughout many divisions of the library. Fragments of my new findings on the wartime odyssey and tragic postwar fate of the Turgenev Library presented at the Colloquium were reported by Ivan Tolstoi, “Ot mifov k podlinnoi istorii,” Russkaia mysl' (Paris), 28–29 January 2001, p. 13. My summary article detailing the wartime and postwar fate of the library will appear with the Colloquium proceedings, and my more detailed study, The Odyssey of the Turgenev Library from Paris, 1940–2001, with appended documents is planned as a separate publication.
[26] Ella Maksimova, “Piat’ dnei v Osobom arkhive,” Izvestiia, nos. 49–53 (18–22 February 1990), based on an interview with TsGOA director Anatolii Prokopenko. A notice by Maksimova, “Arkhivnyi detektiv,” Izvestiia, no. 177 (24 June 1989), was the first mention of the archive in print in connection with the transfer of microfilms of Auschwitz records to the Red Cross.
[27] Evgenii Kuz'min, “‘Vyvezti. . . unichtozhit'. . . spriatat' . . . ’ Sud'by trofeinykh arkhivov” (interview with P. K. Grimsted), Literaturnaia gazeta, no. 39 (2 October 1991), p. 13; publication of that interview was delayed for almost a year and was permitted in print only after August 1991. See the follow-up interview with TsGOA director, Anatolii Prokopenko, in the article by Ella Maksimova—“Arkhivy Frantsuzskoi razvedki skryvali na Leningradskom shosse,” Izvestiia, no. 240 (9 October 1991).
[28] See more information about the merger and a brief overview of the history, holdings, and bibliography of published reference literature, in Archives of Russia: A Directory and Bibliographic Directory of Holdings in Moscow and St. Petersburg, English edition ed. Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, Introduction by Vladimir P. Kozlov, 2 vols. (Armonk, NY, London: M.E. Sharpe, 2000), vol. 1, pp. 225–30, with bibliographic updates on the ArcheoBiblioBase website—http://www.iisg.nl/~abb. Since the merger, fond numbers have remained the same for all of the former TsGOA/TsKhIDK holdings as now held in RGVA, except that the letter “K” now follows the fond number. Data from the parallel ABB Russian-language file is available at http://rusarchives.ru/
[29] As recounted to me by the Russian archival leader who had been sent to Paris for ICA discussions. There were many newspaper accounts in Paris about the French archives—for example, Thierry Wolton, “L’histoire de France dormait à Moscou” (interview with Anatolii Prokopenko), L’Express (21 November 1991).
[30] Regarding the materials returned to France earlier, see Claire Sibille, “Les Archives du ministère de la Guerre recupérées de Russie,” Gazette des Archives, no. 176 (1997): 64–77; and Dominique Devaus, “Les Archives de la direction de la Sûreté rapatriées de Russie,” ibid., pp. 78–86. See also Sophie Coeuré, Frédéric Monier, and Gérard Naud, “Le retour de Russie des archives françaises. Le cas de fond de la Sûreté,” Vingtième siècle, no. 45 (January-March 1995): 133–39.
[31] The 2000 restitution was not publicized at the time in either Moscow or Paris. I first learned of the October transfer when it was announced that the reading room of the former Special Archive (now part of RGVA) was closed that day. An earlier transfer took place in February 2000. Colleagues in Rosarkhiv and at the Quai d’Orsay kindly briefed me on the transfers. Regarding the return of the Masonic archives, see Pierre Mollier, “Paris–Berlin– Moscou: Les archives retrouvées,” L’Histoire, no. 256 (July-August 2001): 78–81, and Grimsted (interview by Pierre Mollier), “Les prises de guerre de l’Armée rouge: Témoignage de Patricia Kennedy Grimsted,” ibid., 84–85.
[32] Avoiding the term “restitution,” it was then dubbed “an exchange for archival records of Russian provenance, located on the territory of the French Republic.”—“Ob obmene arkhivnykh dokumentov Frantsuzskoi Respubliki, peremeshchennykh na territoriiu Rossiiskoi Federatsii v rezul'tate Vtoroi mirovoi voiny, na arkhivnye dokumenty rossiiskogo proiskhozhdeniia, nakhodiashchiesia na territorii Frantsuzskoi Respubliki”: Postanovlenie Gosudarstvennoi Dumy Federal'nogo sobraniia RF ot 22 maia 1998 g., no. 2504–II GD, Sobranie zakonodatel'stva Rossiiskoi Federatsii, 1998, no. 24 (15 June), statute 2662.
[33] Details are provided in Grimsted, Trophies of War and Empire, chapter 10, pp. 413–15, and my earlier article, “‘Trophy’ Archives and Non-Restitution.”
[34] See, for example, E. G. Baskakov and O. V. Shavblovskii, “Vozvrashchenie arkhivnykh materialov, spasennykh Sovetskoi Armiei,” Istoricheskii arkhiv, 1958, no. 5, pp. 175–79; S. L. Tikhvinskii, “Pomoshch' Sovetskogo Soiuza drugim gosudarstvam v vossozdanii natisional'nogo arkhivnogo dostoianiia,” Sovetskie arkhivy, 1979, no. 2, pp. 11–16.
[35] Regarding captured German records in Moscow and related restitution problems, see Kai von Jena, “Die Rückführung deutscher Akten aus Russland—eine unerledigte Aufgabe,” in Archiv und Geschichte: Festschrift für Friedrich P. Kahlenberg, ed. by Klaus Oldenhage, Hermann Schreyet, and Wolfram Werner (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 2000), pp. 391–420. An estimated two million files were restituted to the German Democratic Republic (GDR) before 1991, but none since.
[36] Vladimir Tarasov’s remarks have been reprinted in several variants. For example, his 1998 contribution, “The Return of Archival Documents, Moved to the USSR as a Result of World War II,” Spoils of War: International Newsletter, no. 6, pp. 53–57 (also available in Russian), was reprinted (unfortunately without updating) in Arkhivy Ukraïny, 2001, no. 3, pp. 75–77. All versions are available electronically: English—http://lostart.de and Russian—http://www.libfl.ru/restitution. See also Tarasov’s more recent contribution to the 2000 VGBIL conference, “Problems of Looted Archives”/“Problemy peremeshchennykh arkhivov,” http://www.libfl.ru/restitution/conf/tarasov.html; (English: .../tarasov_eng.html).
[37] See the Russian version of my report on the Russian retrieval of archival Rossica “Tsel' vyiavleniia zarubezhnoi arkhivnoi Rossiki: politika ili kul'tura?” in Zarubezhnaia arkhivnaia Rossika: Itogi i perspektivy vyiavleniia i vozvrashcheniia. Materialy Mezhdunarodnoi nauchno-prakticheskoi konferentsii, 16–17 noiabria 2000 g., Moskva, ed. Vladimir P. Kozlov (Moscow, 2001; Rosarkhiv, Rossiiskoe obshchestvo istorikov-arkhivistov); an English version of my paper is in preparation.
[38] See Grimsted, Trophies of War and Empire, especially chapter 11. The full text of
the law appears as “O kul'turnykh tsennostiakh, peremeshchennykh v Soiuz SSR v
resul'tate Vtoroi mirovoi voiny i nakhodiashchikhsia na territorii Rossiiskoi
Federatsii” (signed 15 April 1998–64-FZ), in Sobranie zakonodatel'stva RF, no. 16 (20 April 1998), statute 1879.
An English translation (along with the original Russian text) is available
electronically—http://docproj.loyola.edu.
The Constitutional Court decision is printed in Sobranie zakonodatel'stva RF, no. 30 (26 August 1999), statute
3989, pp. 6988–7007, and appears electronically—http://www.libfl.ru/restitution/law/law7.html.
See the statements by the then Minister of Culture, Vladimir Egorov and several
museum leaders in “Nachinaem restituirovat'. No Germanii ne dadim nichego,” Kommersant', no. 127 (21 July 1999), p.
10, and “Spravedlivoe reshenie v nespravedlivykh obstoiatel'stvakh,” Kul'tura, no. 27 (29 July–4 August
1999), p. 1. English translations of the Court decision, law, and other
relevant documents appear under the country coverage for Russia at the website—http://www.comartrecovery.org/policies/es9
and …/russ_dec.htm.
[39] The text of the amendments—“O vnesenii
izmenenii i dopolnenii v Federal'nyi zakon ‘O kul'turnykh tsennostiakh,
peremeshchennykh v Soiuz SSR v resul'tate Vtoroi mirovoi voiny i
nakhodiashchikhsia na territorii Rossiiskoi Federatsii’” (25 May 2000–No.
70-FZ) appears in Sobranie zakonodatel'stva
RF, statute 2259; and electronically—http://www.libfl.ru/restitution/law3.html
and . . . law5.html; and in English at http://www.comartrecovery.org/policies/es10.htm.
[40] “O vnesenii izmenenii i dopolnenii v
Polozhenie o Ministerstve kul'tury Rossiiskoi Federatsii” (2 December 2000—no.
913); and “O merakh po realizatsii Federal'nogo zakona ‘O kul'turnykh
tsennostiakh, peremeshchennykh v Soiuz SSR v resul'tate Vtoroi mirovoi voiny i
nakhodiashchikhsia na territorii Rossiiskoi Federatsii’” (11 March 2001, no.
174). An electronic version of the latter appears at the VGBIL website— http://www.libfl.ru/restitution/law/law1/
and in English at http://www.comartrecovery.org/policies/russ–res.htm.
A further Government regulation on 22 August 2001 changed the composition of
the Interagency Council (Postanovlenie
Pravitel'stva RF, no. 617)
[41] I am grateful to Victor Gray, director of the Rothschild Archive
in London, for sharing with me the news of this transfer. Rosarkhiv colleagues
informed me about the negotiations last summer in Moscow, and Richard Davies
kindly shared with me a series of articles on the “exchange” by Geraldine
Norman—“Rothschilds in deal over Tsar’s love letters to mistress”; “How banks
dynasty recovered its heritage”; and “3,000 letters that spell out a tsar’s
love” that appeared in The Telegraph (19 May 2001) Internet
version. Russian accounts include
Tat'iana Andriasova, “Liubovnye pis'ma v obmen na finansovyi otchet: Sem'ia
Rotshil'dov darit Rossii arkhiv Aleksandra II i ego morganaticheskoi zheny
Ekateriny Dolgorukoi,” Moskovskie
novosti, 2001, no. 38 (18–24 September), p. 25; and Dmitrii Vladimirov and
Dmitrii Starostin, “Arkhivazhnyi arkhiv: Rotshil'dy prosiat vernut' im
otobrannoe imushchestvo,” Izvestiia,
12 May 2001, p. 2. At the time of the transfer in Moscow, Tat'iana
Fedotkina, “Strast' v shapke Monomakha: Liubovnaia perepiska imperatora
Aleksandra II vchera vernulas' na rodinu,” Moskovskii
komsomolets, no. 268 (30 November 2001), p. 1, quotes Rosakhiv Chief
Vladimir Kozlov as saying that the letters were purchased by the family from
Sotheby’s—but in fact it was Christie’s! Kozlov quoted a figure of $350,000 for
the 5,107 letters, but while the Rothschild Archive is not divulging the price,
reportedly it was below the asking pricepf $250,000.
See Frank Trentmann, “New Sources on an Old Family: the Rothschild Papers at the Special Archive, Moscow—and a Letter from Metternich,” Financial History Review 2:1 (April 1995): 73–79. Those papers constituted RGVA fond 637K (2 opisi; 419 file units; 1769–1939). See also the description in Gerhard Jagschitz and Stefan Karner, “Beuteakten aus Österreich”: Der Österreichbestand im russischen “Sonderarchiv” Moskau (Graz, Vienna: Selbsverlag des Ludwig Boltzmann-Instituts für Kriegsfolgen-Forschung, 1996; = Veröffentlichungen des Ludwig Boltzmann-Instituts für Kriegsfolgen-Forschung, vol. 2), pp. 128–30.
[42] According to the formal decree (5 June
2001; Postanovlenie Pravitel'stva RF, no. 437), 22 fonds of Dutch provenance
were to be restituted immediately and the additional 9 fonds claimed by the
Netherlands were to be transferred by the end of 2001. I am grateful to Eric
Ketelaar, who heads the Dutch archival expert commission, for acquainting me
with the text of the agreement and to RGVA archivists for clarification on the
subject. See Ketelaar’s recently published report, “Nederlandse archieven in
Moskou: Winterslaap ten einde,”
Archievenblad 105/6 (August 2001): 36–39.
[43] I am grateful to colleagues from the Amsab Institute of Social History in Ghent for keeping me informed of archival restitution developments for Belgium, for which they have been serving as experts. Michel Vermote (Amsab) presented a report on the negotiations at an IISH seminar with me in Amsterdam in late September 2001, the papers from which is now available electronically at the IISH website: http://www.iisg.nl/archives_Russia/. The authorizing decree was issued on 7 December (Postanovlenie Pravitel'stva RF, no. 858).
[44] I appreciate the kindness of specialists in the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs who have been keeping me informed about archival restitution negotiations.
[45] Prikaz of the Ministry of Culture, no. 305 (30 March 2001), “Ob inventarizatsii peremeshchennykh kul'turnykh tsennostei.”
[46] See the explanatory instructions (20 June 2001), “Ob inventarizatsii peremeshchennykh kul'turnykh tsennostei,” issued over the signature of Deputy Minister of Culture Pavel Vadimovich Khoroshilov.
[47] Ibid.
[48] See my earlier article, “Displaced Archives and Restitution Problems,” as cited in note 1.
[49] “Spravka o resul'tatakh raboty GAU NKVD
SSSR po vozvrashcheniiu v Sov[etskii] Soiuz dokumental'nykh materialov GAF SSSR
i o vyvoze v SSSR arkhivov inostrannogo proiskhozhdeniia,” signed by Golubtsov
and Kuz'min (15 August 1945), GA RF, 5325/10/2148, fols. 1–4, and the
accompanying top secret memorandum signed by Golubtsov, “Svedeniia o
dokumental'nykh materialakh inostrannogo proiskhozhdeniia vyvezennykh v
Sovetskii Soiuz v 1945 godu,” fol. 5, with indication of the archives in
Moscow to which they were directed.
[50] Many reports of materials forwarded by SVAG to the Archival Administration in Moscow, sometimes with accompanying inventories, are found, for example, in GA RF, 5325/2/2579 and 2580, among others. In most cases memoranda indicate the archives or other repositories to which the archival and library materials were directed. These two files were briefly available, but are now classified. Presumably the following two files similarly described (nos. 2581–2582) contain additional reports.
[51] Kruglov to Beria (5 April 1945),
GA RF, 5325/10/2025, fol. 4; a copy of the same list was addressed
from Beria to Molotov (6 April 1945), fol. 5. See also the unregistered
draft with a variant ending, fol. 3.
[52] Lists of German archival materials selected among the cultural treasures found in one series of mines in Saxony are included with the report by Golubtsov to I. A. Serov, “Dokladnaia zapiska o rezul'tatakh obsledovaniia dokumental'nykh materialov germanskikh arkhivov, evakuirovannykh i ukrytykh v shakhtakh Saksonii” (Berlin, 24 October 1945), GA RF, 5325/2/1353, fol. 216; an additional signed copy is found in 5325/10/2030, fols. 14–35. See also the report included with G. Aleksandrov, N. Zhukov, and A. Poryvaev to TsK VKP(b) Secretary G. M. Malenkov, RGASPI, 17/125/308, fols. 41–46.
[53] Most of the Romanian holdings went to Odesa [Odessa], Chernivtsy [Chernovtsy], and the Moldavian SSR in Chisinau [Kishinev], or to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and security agencies in Moscow. Many were later returned to Romania. Full information about their extent and location is still not available. See the most revealing study by Gheorghe Buzatu, Românii în arhivele Kremlinului (Bucharest: Univers Enciclopedic, 1996; =“Colecţia Românii în istoria universală,” vol. 31). Buzatu lists the Romanian fonds (pp. 174–76), in some case with file descriptions.
[54] “Protokol soveshchaniia” (21 August 1945), GA RF, 5325/2/3623, fols. 2–3, fol. 8.
[55] RGVA, fond 1432K, obzor; in the case of that fond no opis' is available today, which is one of the explanations for the delay in the restitution of the Dutch files therein that have been claimed by the Netherlands. Eric Ketelaar alerted me to this problem, and I subsequently examined the obzor in RGVA.
[56] The earlier website, sponsored by the Klassika/Classica Foundation, had many misleading elements and was finally closed down at the end of 1998 under pressure from Rosarkhiv. Classica had been peddling copies for upwards of $10 per page, in comparison the $1 per page offered to researchers by the archive itself.
[57] Provisional title: Kratkii spravochnik po dokumentam inostrannogo proiskhozhdeniia, fondam Glavnogo upravleniia po delam voennoplennykh i internirovannykh (GUPVI) NKVD–MVD SSSR i dokumentam, peredannykh v stranakh poiskhozhdeniia (Moscow: Rosarkhiv/RGVA, forthcoming).
[58] Götz Aly and Susanne Heim, Das Zentrale Staatsarchiv in Moskau (“Sonderarchiv”): Rekonstruktion und Bestandsverzeichnis verschollen geglaubten Schriftguts aus der NS-Zeit (Düsseldorf: Hans-Böckler-Stiftung, 1992).
[59] Gerhard Jagschitz and Stefan Karner,“Beuteakten aus Österreich”: Der Österreichbestand im russischen “Sonderarchiv” Moskau (Graz, Vienna, 1996; = Veröffentlichungen des Ludwig Boltzmann-Instituts für Kriegsfolgen-Forschung, vol. 2).
[60] Fondy bel'giiskogo proiskhozhdeniia: Annotirovannyi ukazatel', comp. A. S. Namazova and T. A. Vasil'eva,ed. M. M. Mukhamedzhanov (Moscow, 1995); Flemish version: Fondsen van Belgische Herkomst: Verklarende: Index, ed. H. De Conninck, P. Creve, M. Vermote, and M. M. Mukhamedzhanov; translated by E. Saelmaekers (Ghent: Amsab, 1997). An earlier survey of Belgian holdings, compiled by Wouter Steenhaut and Michel Vermote (Amsab) also covers holdings in RGASPI (formerly RTsKhIDNI)—AMSAB Tijdingen, n.s. 16 (Summer 1992), extra number: Mission to Moscow. Belgische socialistische Archive in Russland. See also the intriguing study of the migration of the Belgian records in Moscow by Jacques Lust, Evert Maréchal, Wouter Steenhaut, and Michel Vermote, Een Zoektocht naar Archieven: Van NISG naar AMSAB (Ghent: Amsab, 1997).
[61] Archiwalia polskiej proweniencji terytorialnej przechowywane w Państwowym Archiwum Federacji Rosyjskiej i Rosyjskim Państwowym Archiwum Wojskowym (Archiwalia włady rosyjskich 1813–1918, archiwalia niemieckie z ziem zachodnich i północnych Polski do 1945. Archiwalia Senatu WM Gdańska 1920–1939), ed. Władysław Stępniak and Aleksandra Belerska (Warsaw: NDAP, 2000). The guide also describes fonds of Polish provenance in GA RF.
[62] I am grateful to colleagues at IISH in Amsterdam and to Eric
Ketelaar of the University of Amsterdam for keeping me informed about the Dutch
holdings in Moscow and furnishing me a copy of the most recent March 2000 list.
See Ketelaar’s report cited in note 42.
Evert J. Kwaadgras, archivist for the Great East of the Netherlands, shared with me the results of his research in RGVA, after I furnished him with indications of the Dutch Masonic files I had noticed there. See his report to the April 2000 Moscow conference (in English and Russian), “A Great Waste of Time and Energy: The Seizure and Scrutiny of Masonic Documents During and After World War II” —http://www.libfl.ru/restitution/conf/kwaadgras_e.html; (Russian: …kwaadgras_r.html).
[63] For a brief overview of all these archives and a bibliography of published reference literature, see Archives of Russia.
[64] The recent guide to personal papers in RGASPI admits that the “basic part of the fond was acquired in 1946 from Germany among displaced archival materials.” RTsKhIDNI: Putevoditel' po fondam i kollektsiiam lichnogo proiskhozhdeniia, ed. Iu. N. Amiantova, K. M. Anderson, et al. (Moscow, 1996; =Spravochno-informatsionnye materialy k dokumental'nym fondam RTsKhIDNI, vol. 2). The retrieval of the Lassalle papers is highlighted in the report of Golubtsov to I. A. Serov, “Dokladnaia zapiska o rezul'tatakh obsledovaniia dokumental'nykh materialov germanskikh arkhivov, evakuirovannykh i ukrytykh v shakhtakh Saksonii” (Berlin, 24 October 1945), GA RF, 5325/2/1353, fol. 216 (another signed copy in 5325/10/2030, fol. 35).
[65] Indications of transfers of such files to IML are apparent in the working annotated copies of TsGOA inventories (for example fonds 500K and 501K). Some of these were never fully processed in TsPA (and hence still not available to researchers), but their existence there has been confirmed by RGASPI archivists.
[66] Musatov to Nikitinskii (12 June 1947), GA RF, 5325/2/1946, fols. 49–51. As was explained the fond also contained executive office records of Frederich Adler and original autograph letters of Avgust Bebel and Karl Kautsky, among others. Possibly these materials are included in RGASPI, fond 340, but further analysis is necessary in comparison with existing Nazi documents and others available.
[67] The fond “Rabochii sotsialisticheskii internatsional,” GA RF, 7007 (118 units; 1919, 1923–1939), contains a miscellaneous collection of materials of Western European socialist provenance. It is not listed in the recent guide to RZIA holdings (see below).
[68] The records of the IISH Paris Branch and the files of the Second International are mentioned in several Soviet reconnaissance and transfer reports involving the RSHA cache in Wölfelsdorf (see below). Seizure of the Adler materials from Brussels is also mentioned in several Nazi reports and is confirmed in documentation available at IISH in Amsterdam. See, for example, the ERR reports from Brussels (4 December 1941), TsDAVO, 3676/1/161, fol. 107, and (6 March 1941), fols. 68–69.
[69] The undated list is one of a series that accompanied an ERR report to Berlin, found among the ERR files in TsDAVO, 3676/1/172, fols. 274–275.
[70] Kruglov to Stalin, GA RF, 9401/2/134, fols. 1–2. The official act of transfer detailed the terms of the gift; the presentation leather-bound official copy is retained in GA RF, 5325/2/1354.
[71] Kruglov to Zhdanov (15 May 1946), GA RF, 5325/10/2023, fol. 46. RZIA was opened for public research in 1988. For more details about the transfer from Prague and the freight-wagon load of materials that went to Kyiv from the parallel Ukrainian Historical Cabinet (UIK) in Prague, see Grimsted, Trophies of War and Empire, chapter 9.
[72] See listings under GA RF in Federal'nye arkhivy Rossii i ikh nauchno-spravochnyi apparat: Kratkii spravochnik, comp. O. Iu. Nezhdanova; ed. V. P. Kozlov (Moscow: Rosarkhiv, 1994).
[73] See Fondy Russkogo zagranichnogo istoricheskogo arkhiva v Prage: Mezharkhivnyi putevoditel', ed. T. F. Pavlova et al. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1999). See more details about the RZIA transfer from Prague and distribution of the records of Ukrainian provenance in Grimsted, Trophies of War and Empire, chapter 9.
[74] These and other materials received with them from TsGOA are now part of various fonds all of which are described in the recent series of GA RF guides. Regarding the RSHA loot seized by Soviet authorities in Silesia and its dispersal, see below (note 92).
[75] See more details and additional examples in my article in preparation on the Russian retrieval of archival Rossica abroad for Cahiers du Monde Russe; a condensed version of it is published in Russian in the proceedings of the Rosarkhiv conference mentioned above (note 37).
[76] The file in question in RGVA remains part of the IISH fond in RGVA, 528K/1/69, and includes correspondence between Nikolaevskii (then in Berlin) and RZIA, 1928–1931.
[77] Other documentation collected for the IISH by Boris Nikolaevskii was deposited in the fond of his personal papers now in GA RF (fond R-9217; 2 opisi; 164 file units; 1900–1929) and those of Viktor Chernov (fond R-5847; 2 opisi; 441 file units; 1892–1938), among others. The seizure of these materials from Paris is well documented among the Papers of Boris Souvarine held by IISH in Amsterdam, especially the Souvarine correspondence with French authorities and attestations of Nazi confiscation (folder 8), including Nikolaevskii’s list of his own papers and other seized materials on deposit with IISH in Paris.
[78] Fragmentary administrative records of the Turgenev Library confiscated by the Nazis from Paris are currently held in GA RF, fonds 6846 (141 files) and a few additional files relating to books borrowed by Russian soldiers at the end of World War I are held separately in fond 6162 (13 files); approximately three additional partially processed archival boxes (ca.18 files) remain in the Manuscript Division of RGB. See the official “act of transfer” to TsGAOR from the Special Holdings of GBL (18 November 1948), GA RF, 5142/1/423, fol. 141. The outgoing copy or related GBL documentation has not been located in RGB. Archivists in the RGB MS Division verified for me their current holdings of approximately three archival boxes. See more details in my forthcoming study of the fate of the Turgenev Library. The Burtsev papers in TsGAOR may now contain some of those files from Byloe, but it has not yet been possible to verify their acquisition.
[79] See Grimsted, “The Odyssey of the Petliura Library from Paris and the Records of the Ukrainian National Republic during World War II,” Cultures and Nations of Central and Eastern Europe: Essays in Honor of Roman Szporluk, ed. Zvi Gitelman et al., = Harvard Ukrainian Studies 22 (1998): 181–208; and “The Postwar Fate of the Petliura Library and the Records of the Ukrainian National Republic,” HUS 21 (1997): 393–461. The Ukrainian émigré files from the Petliura Library now held in RGVA were on the official list of fonds to be restituted to France, but they were not transferred. The contingent files in GA RF were not included in the French claims.
[80] The Esterhazy papers (fond 721; 51 units; 1818–1893) are mentioned in GA RF: Putevoditel', vol. 1: Fondy GA RF po istorii Rossii XIX–nachala XX vv. (Moscow, 1994), p. 313. The acquisition of the trophy documentation “found in the castle of the Esterhazy counts (Hungary)” by the GA RF predecessor TsGIAM from the Political Directorate of the Red Army was reported by Maksakov and Morovskaia to I. I. Nikitinskii (16 June 1945), GA RF, 5325/2/1353, fol. 47. Mention is made of a letter of the Russian Foreign Minister A. M. Gorchakov and a letter of Metternich (1859).
[81] The TsGADA theft, the so-called “Apostolov Affair” was first described in print by Rem Petrov and Andrei Chernyi, “Poteriavshi—plachem,” Ogonek, 1990, no. 9, pp. 9–11, along with several others. A detailed study of the wartime and postwar fate of those Hanseatic archives is yet to be written, although some details have been published in Germany since their return.
[82] Kolasa and Lehmann, eds., Die Trophäenkommissionen der Roten Armee, especially documents nos. 37–41, pp. 218–33. That group of documents regarding trophy musicalia is now reclassified—i.e. carefully sealed off in the original file in RGASPI, 17/132/418, namely reports from the Ministry of Culture to the CP Central Committee. According to the table of contents at the beginning of the file, the sealed documents are presumably those relating to trophy music. According to the “use slip” in that file, xerox copies were furnished to the Ministry of Culture in 1992. My formal letter of inquiry with request for declassification (addressed to RGASPI and Rosarkhiv in October 1999) has not received a reply.
[83] See Die Trophäenkommissionen der Roten Armee, doc. no. 39 (15 July 1950), signed by A. Bol'semennikov and addressed to General N. N. Bespalov of the Committee for Cultural Affairs of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, pp. 227–29. Thanks to intervention by the Ministry of Culture in April 2000, I was permitted to consult a preliminary card catalogue of this collection, together with the Dutch musicologist Willem de Vries. We were allowed to examine only 10 out of an estimated 200 original (many autograph) scores. In November 2000 De Vries presented an unauthorized and somewhat misleading report on this collection on Dutch television and in an article published in Germany. Specialists in the Glinka Museum have subsequently kindly verified holdings with me and discussed their plans, but the collection currently (as of fall 2001) remains closed to researchers, pending full processing and publication of a catalogue.
[84] The seizure of one crate of Artur Rubinstein materials in the former RSHA headquarters in Berlin is mentioned in a Trophy Brigade report—“Otchet o rabote . . . s 6 maia po 31 dek. 194[5] g.,” signed by Manevskii (31 March 1946), GA RF, A-534/2/10, fol. 48 (another copy is in A-534/2/1, fol. 103). Part of the report is published in German translation in Die Trophäenkommissionen der Roten Armee, p. 105 (doc. 17). The Rubinstein collection was earlier plundered from Paris by the ERR. Efforts are underway to trace the fate of the rest of the Rubinstein collection, presumably in Russia.
[85] The collection was then held as fond 441 in TsDAMLM, but was not identified with the Sing-Akademie nor even as containing music scores. With the return of the originals to Berlin, microfilms remain in their place. It was a German listing of a collection of “5,170 units from a Berlin Music Library” in the Kyiv Conservatory (Die Trophäenkommissionen der Roten Armee, doc. no. 46, p. 245) that led me to the discovery. That document is identified as coming from the records of the CP Central Committee Secretariat (fond 4) in TsKhSD (now RGANI), but remains classified. See the Grimsted report, “Bach Scores in Kyiv: The Long-Lost Sing-Akademie Collection Surfaces in Ukraine,” Spoils of War: International Newsletter, no. 7 (August 2000): 23–35; electronically: http://www.huri.harvard.edu/workpaper/grimsted.html, and http://www.lostart.de; Russian edition: “Partitury Bakha v Kieve: Na Ukraine obnaruzheny davno propavshie noty Berlinskoi Zing-Akademii,” Voennye trofei: Mezhdunarodnyi biulleten’, no. 7 (August 2000): 16–24; electronically http://spoils.libfl.ru/spoils/rus.
[86] My more recent article raises questions regarding its transfer to Kyiv—“Odisseia ‘Berlin–Ullersdorf–?–Kyïv’: Do istoriï peremishchennia arkhivu Akademiï spivu v Berlini pid chas i pislia Druhoï svitovoï viiny,” Arkhivy Ukraïny, 2001, no. 3, pp. 25–39. Also available electronically—http://www.scarch.kiev.ua/Publicat/Archives/2001/au2001-3.ua.html#Patricia. The article includes a map and my photograph (taken in October 1999) of what are now the ruins of the castle of Ullersdorf. Subsequently Kyiv colleagues found the official act of transfer of the “Archive of the Sing-Akademie in Berlin” to the Conservatory from the Committee for the Arts of the Ukrainian SSR on 2 November 1945. That was ten days after the date the “Director of the Kyiv State Conservatory, A. M. Lufer,” was ordered to Germany “on the request of Soviet Occupation Forces, . . . as part of a brigade of specialists for appraisal of discovered cultural treasures” at the expense of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine. The newly discovered documents are published as “Odisseia Arkhivu Akademiï v Berlini: lanka, iakoï brakuvalo,” Arkhivy Ukraïny, 2001, no. 5, available electronically—http://www.scarch.kiev.ua/Publicat/Archives/2001/au2001-5.ua.html#Odiseya.
[87] The Ukrainian government directive authorizing the transfer was issued on 18 October 2001, following up on a letter of intention from Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma to German Chancellor Schroeder in January 2001. Pictures of the protocol signing with the text of the government decree and a news brief appear at the Derzhkomarkhiv website: http://www.scarch.kiev.ua/news/archive-Bach-Protocol.ua.html. Notices about the return appeared in numerous newspapers, as for example, “Ukraina nachala restitutsiiu,” Kommersant’, no. 171 (20 September 2001), p. 13, and the Herald Tribune, 21 September 2001.
[88] News about the performance and my pre-concert remarks were posted on the Ukrainian Research Institute website at Harvard University—http://www.huri.harvard.edu/. See more information about the Sing-Akademie collection and its fate at the website of TsDAMLM —http://www.scarch.kiev.ua/.
[89] As quoted by Vsevolod Tsaplin, “Arkhivy, voina i okkupatsiia (1941–1945 gody)” (typescript, Moscow, 1960), p. 359. Records of the Danzig Branch are now held as a separate fond in TsGVA, fond 1387K.
[90] Zapevalin to Nikitinskii (20 July 1945), GA RF, 5325/2/1353, fol. 207. The same report lists the major seizure from Potsdam without any specific quantity. Tsaplin confirms Soviet seizures from Berlin-Wannsee of “200 studebaker [truck loads],” Vsevolod Tsaplin, “O rozyske dokumentov, pokhishchennykh v gody voiny iz arkhivokhanilishch SSSR,” Otechestvennye arkhivy, 1997, no. 5, p. 13.
[91] Receipt of the papers of Vienna-born Alfons Israel Rothschild by the RSHA in Wölfelsdorf (18 July 1944) is documented in RSHA records in RGVA, 500K/1/1302, fol. 27.
[92] See more details
in the earlier studies by Grimsted, “Twice Plundered or “‘Twice
Saved’? Russia’s ‘Trophy’ Archives and the Loot of the
Reichssicherheitshauptamt,” Holocaust and
Genocide Studies 15(2) (September 2001): 191–244, Trophies of War and Empire, pp. 288–99, and the initial report,
“New Clues in the Records of Archival and Library Plunder during World War II:
The ERR Ratibor Center and the RSHA VII Amt in Silesia,” in The Return of Looted Collections
(1946–1996). An Unfinished Chapter: Proceedings of an International Symposium
to Mark the 50th Anniversary of the Return of Dutch Collections from Germany,
ed. F. J. Hoogewoud, E. P. Kwaardgras et al. (Amsterdam: IISH, 1997),
pp. 52–67. I am currently preparing a monograph on these operations with
extensive documentary appendixes.
[93] These are now held as RGVA, fonds 500K and
501K, although some were transferred to the GDR, some to the Central Party
Archive, and some presumably remain with Russian security services. This
important group of RSHA records deserve professional reprocessing and a
microform edition in its entirety that could be available to interested
researchers in different countries, particularly since archival materials
looted from so many countries are mentioned in its files.
[94] The fate of these materials is also covered in Grimsted, “Twice Plundered or ‘Twice Saved’? Russia’s ‘Trophy’ Archives and the Loot of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt,” especially pp. 215–18. Regarding those returned to France from Russia, see notes 30–32.
[95] Vitalii Iu. Afiani, “Dokumenty o zarubezhnoi arkhivnoi Rossike i peremeshchennykh arkhivakh v fondakh Tsentra khraneniia sovremennoi dokumentatsii,” in Problemy zarubezhnoi arkhivnoi Rossiki: Sbornik statei (Moscow: Informatsionno-izd. agentsvo “Russkii mir,” 1997), p. 96. Precise documentation regarding the transfer is not furnished.
[96] ERR art looting in the West and Rosenberg’s alliance with Göring are well analyzed by Jonathon Petropolus, in Art as Politics in the Third Reich (University of North Carolina Press, 1996). See also the relevant chapters in Lynn Nicholas, The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994); now also available in a Russian translation: Pokhishchenie Evropy: Sud'ba kul'turnykh tsennostei v gody natsizma (Moscow: “Logos,” 2001).
[97] My detailed study of the ERR operations is in preparation; see Trophies of War and Empire, chapter 8, and my 1997 report (note 92).
[98] The existence of these two libraries in Ratibor are mentioned in ERR reports; see, for example (Ratibor, 14 February 1944), BAB, NS 30/22, fol. 246. See more details in Grimsted, “The Odyssey of the Petliura Library,” pp. 189–91.
[99] Hülle to ERR HAG-Ukraine (8 November 1943), fol. 288—and his monthly report for November 1943 (fol. 268), in the same file both confirm that the shipment with the Dnipropetrovs'k material left for Ratibor on 5 November 1943. See more details about the Dnipropetrovs'k and Kyiv revolutionary-period archives in Grimsted, Odyssey of the “Smolensk Archive”: Plundered Communist Records for the Service of Anti-Communism (Pittsburgh: REES, 1995; Carl Beck Papers in Russian & East European Studies, no. 1201), pp. 20–23.
[100] See more details in Grimsted, Smolensk Archive.
[101] The preliminary Grimsted survey is on
deposit with the Bundesarchiv and the Holocaust Museum: “The Records of the
Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), Their Archival Fate and a Proposal
for a Comprehensive Microform Edition with a Virtual Electronic Finding Aid:
Introduction with Working Archival and Bibliographic Data” (latest version
October 2001); publication as a Working Paper for the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum and IISH is planned.
[102] Nikolai Gubenko, in Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets, pp. 513–18.
[103] See G. Aleksandrov to TsK VKP(b) Secretary G. M. Malenkov, RGASPI, 17/125/308, fol. 51.
[104] Wolfgang Eichwede and Ulrike Hartung, eds., Property Cards Art, Claims und Shipments auf CD-ROM: Amerikanische Rückführungen sowjetischer Kulturgüter an die UdSSR nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg—Die CD der Arbeitsstelle “Verbleib der im zweiten Weltkrieg aus der Sowjetunion verlagerten Kulturgüter” (Bremen: Forschungsstelle Osteuropa, 1996).
[105] See U.S. Restitution of Nazi-Looted Cultural Treasures to the USSR, 1945–1959: Facsimile Documents from the National Archives of the United States, compiled with an Introduction by Patricia Kennedy Grimsted; foreword by Michael J. Kurtz, CD-ROM edition (Washington, DC: GPO, 2001; prepared in collaboration with the U.S. National Archives). A summary of my initial introduction presented at the VGBIL April 2000 conference appears with the proceedings—http://www.libfl.ru/restitution/conf/grimsted2.html. An article will appear in Prologue (spring 2002).
[106] Aleksandr A. Surikov, addressing the Council of the Federation,
quoted in Soviet Federatsii Federal'nogo
Sobraniia, Zasedanie deviatoe, Biulleten',
no. 1 (17 July 1996), p. 59. The same argument was also presented by
Nikolai Gubenko, p. 60. Gubenko now heads the Committee on Culture in the Duma,
and earlier served as Minister of Culture of the USSR under Mikhail Gorbachev.
[107] Nikolai Gubenko, interview with the radio station “Echo of Moscow” (22 April 1997), “Luchshie interv'iu,” electronic version: http://www.data.ru/echo/2504gub.html, p. 10 of 12.
[108] See Grigorii Kozlov (with Konstantin Akinsha), “Diplomatic Debate on Cultural Restitution Matters 1945–1946,” electronic version in English and Russian in the April 2000 VGBIL conference proceedings—http://www.libfl.ru/restitution/conf/kozlov_e.html; (Russian: …kozlov_r.html). Extensive lists of German cultural treasures looted by Soviet authorities have been found in the U.S. National Archives. See, for example, the secret report on “Soviet Removals of Cultural Materials” (7 June 1947) addressed to the Adjutant General at the War Department from Lt. Col. G. H. Garde, with 23 enclosures, most of them detailed reports about specific Soviet removals, US NA, RG 260 (OMGUS), Adjutant General decimal files, 1947, box 129.
[109] Nikolai Gubenko, in Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets, pp. 513–18.
[110] UNESCO, “Report of the Director-General on the Study on the Possibility of Transferring Documents from Archives Constituted within the Territory of Other Countries or Relating to their History, within the Framework of Bilateral Agreements,” Nairobi, 1976 (19C/94, § 3.1.1).
[111] See more details in my book, Trophies of War and Empire; the
Thessalonica CITRA resolution is printed as Appendix VI, pp. 555–57, and is
also available in International Council on Archives (ICA) Archival Dependencies in the Information Age, CITRA 1993–1995: Proceedings of the Twenty-Nineth, Thirtieth and
Thirty-First International Conferences of the Round Table on Archives. XXIX
Mexico 1993, XXX Thessaloniki 1994, XXXI Washington 1995 (Dortrecht:
ICA/CIA, 1998), pp. 246–47.
[112] The example of the transmutation of the “meeting on the Elbe” is well-dramatized in the postwar episode in the new 2001 BBC-WGBH film series “The People’s Century,” presented on BBC World in August 2001.
[113] Aleksandr Sevast'ianov, “Bol'she, chem trofei—Polemika . . . s Igorem Maksimychevym,” Nezavisimaia gazeta (14 September 1996): 6. See also the referenced article by Igor F. Maksimychev, “‘Peremechenoe’, ne znachit ‘nich'e’: Nanesti ushcherb natsional'nym interesam mozhno i iz samykh blagorodnykh pobuzhdenii,” Nezavisimaia gazeta (26 July 1996): 2, and Maksimychev’s recent paper at the April 2001 VGBIL conference—“Vykhody iz bezvykhodnogo polozheniia— http://www.libfl.ru/restitution/conf01/maksim.html.
[114] See Nina Tumarkin’s essay, “The Great Patriotic War as Myth and Memory,” The Atlantic 267:6 (June 1991): 26-31; and her book, The Living & The Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York: Basic Books, 1994).
[115] The Thessalonica Community records (RGVA, fond 1428K; 297 file units; 1919–1941) and those from Athens (fond 1427K; 112 file units; 1901–1942) have both been filmed by specialists from Tel Aviv University, where a detailed finding aid is being prepared. Two smaller fonds comprise records of Zionist offices in Thessalonica involved with assisting the emigration of Jews to Palestine (fond 1435K and 1437K), and there are a few more fragmentary files intermixed in a fond labeled for Jewish organizations in the Netherlands (fond 1432K). There are a few additional files of Greek Jewish provenance, such as files of B’nai B’rith from Greece and Yugoslavia (fond 1225K). Copies of all of these Greek fonds are available in USHMM. A Russian agreement recently signed with the Greek Foreign Ministry for the return of the originals was mentioned in the Greek report at the Vilnius Forum. Greek specialists have since examined the materials in Moscow but are still negotiating the terms for their return.
[116] The “Salonica Collection” in the YIVO Archive in New York (RG 207; 3 feet, 2 inches [10 boxes]) in addition to Community records also includes a few files (similar to those in Moscow) from an agency assisting emigration to Palestine. The Municipal Archives in Amsterdam (arch. 1407) includes one and possibly a second folder of documents from the Thessalonica Community and two from YIVO, among a few other stray files received from U.S. restitution authorities after World War II.